Remote work sucks for juniors

We're almost two years into a global pandemic - and at least in Europe and the US, it sure looks like we're nearing the end of this particular chapter in the history books.

So how did our work life fare? On one hand, this forced remote working experiment has managed to prove that our existent infrastructure is enough to keep productivity from zeroing out without people meeting in person or at the office. On the other hand, companies large and small will now have to figure out a new normal as remote working stops being a 'necessary evil'.

My colleagues' opinion has been evenly split between those who thoroughly enjoyed the benefits of working from home (shorter commutes, less office distractions, increased flexibility in work-hours and work patterns, time for deep work, and no mandatory socialization to name a few), and those who yearn to go back to the office (where they can get free snacks and food, a dedicated place to work, casual and effortless interactions with their colleagues, and a better separation of 'home' and 'work' time). For me, it's a combination of both.

But that's not what I want to talk about. No, in this post I want to shine a spotlight on a category of people for which this working-from-home experiment has been uniquely and unequivocally s**t: the juniors, the interns, and generally all of the people at the very beginning of their career.

For people who started their career just before or during the pandemic (that's around 8 million kids in Europe and about as many in the US, so not a negligible number), working from home has three distinctive disadvantages - that are too often absent from the discussions we're having about the future of remote working.

🙈 Learning by doing

The first and most obvious disadvantage our 'work from home grads' are facing is the lack of continuous guidance.

Having no 24/7 mentorship 'on standby', ready to jump in whenever there's a question, a doubt or an opportunity to learn something means that remote grads cannot improve their way of working just by sitting side-by-side with more experienced colleagues.

During the pandemic I have worked both at Adyen and at Wise - two companies that have good and amazing internal documentation respectively, beautiful learning and training hubs, a very supportive environment where mistakes are tolerated and exploration is rewarded, and ample resources in terms of time, headcount and money to train their fresh hires. Both companies were also distributed onto multiple locations before the pandemic.

I can only imagine how horrible it must be for grads joining one-office companies, smaller startups, legacy companies where processes are codified into roles and institutional knowledge rather than written documentation, and companies where business rules are not backed by software rules.

Proponents of remote working argue that it is not necessary to sit next to a physical person to 'soak up' their knowledge - that structured learning sessions and modern tools like digital whiteboarding or team-wide conference calls are good enough substitutes of the good old 'shadow me for a week' method.

I completely disagree. Costly mistakes and important lessons are learned at the most unexpected times: there is no way to catch a fresh graduate hire doing something stupid on a conference call, or to teach them something 'off the cuff' remotely when the need arises.

Even more worryingly, because of remote working, fresh grads are less able to experiment inside the company, and are exposed to a smaller subset of the complex rules and processes that makes a product. Even with all the care and support in the world, this new way of working inherently encourages a task-driven way of working; one that leads fresh graduates to perform within the lines we paint for them in the internal documentation and daily or weekly Zoom catch-ups, rather than learn holistically about whatever we're building.

A controversial statement: I would personally argue that one year of remote working is worth just a few months of physical experience for people at the beginning of their career. This opportunity cost is very real, and will be especially devastating if we enter a recession anytime soon - as junior hires will not have matured sufficient experience to compete with their mid-career peers in a shrinking job market.

🚀 Cruising, not accelerating.

Many of the proponents of remote working like to point to the fact that, almost two years into this experiment, many companies have managed to not slow down their pace in shipping product. This consequently demonstrates that it's possible to keep the same level of productivity while working remotely.

That is only partially true. Both at Adyen and at Wise, my teams have largely managed to keep shipping features at a similar pace as pre-pandemic: however, what I've personally found is that building pre-agreed upon products is something that goes swimmingly when working remotely - and sometimes even faster thanks to the lower amount of interruptions the engineering team enjoys while working from home. But deciding what to build and how to build it - that is, the gestation phase of a new product - is a lot less effective without continuous collaboration and iteration in the office.

This problem is compounded for junior roles that joined the company during the pandemic: not only they have a harder time getting their projects started (just like everyone else); even worse, because of their limited experience they haven't had the chance yet to mature a discovery and iteration framework yet, which makes it even more challenging to start a new product or project, and accelerate it to cruise speeds.

In this remote environment, product discovery and acceleration are hard even for accomplished professionals. New and junior hires will struggle like the rest of us to get the ball rolling on new ideas; but because of the additional difficulty of bonding with the team remotely, discussing complex ideas using only relatively short structured meetings and planning sessions; and of course because they don't have the necessary experience to run these efforts by themselves, they will struggle to acquire the most important skill for mid-career and senior product managers: that of vision and product development.

Remote working keeps junior people at a junior level for longer, and makes it harder for them to develop product sense.

📡 Network issues

The final and most important issue has to do with how the way collaboration and cooperation works within a large company.

It is completely feasible for anyone to get a good relationship with the team they remotely onboard into - regardless of their level of experience: if the team is good and welcoming and the fresh hire has a modicum of interpersonal skills, remote collaboration in a small team can be as effective as physical presence.

But a junior person entering a new company during this pandemic will usually have very few opportunities to get exposed to the workings of other teams and other colleagues outside of his or her direct vertical. And that's a problem: one of the most important things when building products in sprawling organizations is the ability to coordinate your work with different teams to avoid duplicate work and build cohesive products.

For a person at the beginning of his or her career, it will be exceedingly difficult to get face time and casual collaboration going with other teams. This means a remote fresh grad will only be exposed to a subset of the products within the organization; more importantly, they will not easily reach a position where they become the reference for a given product, and they will have a much harder time understanding how their own team fits inside the organization.

In short, remote working makes it especially hard for junior hires to grow their personal and professional network inside the organization, and to become the reference point for the products they're working on.

Mind the gap

Ultimately, I feel that the discussion about whether remote collaboration is a net positive or a net negative is mostly driven by mid-career and senior people, thought leaders, and experienced employees who can speak with authority. This is true both for internal discussions within companies, as well as the general reflection that's happening in the press and online now that the pandemic is coming to an end.

Personally, I would encourage everyone reading this to think back to their early career days - and imagine how it would have been had they been fully remote from the start. A little bit of empathy would go a long way in agreeing with what I explained in this article; that is, that our remote graduates risk:

• 🙈 not having sufficient opportunities to continuously learn from their experienced peers
• 🚀 failing to develop a product sense, and generally struggle to bring any ideas to the table for new products and projects that might propel their career to the next level
• 📡 failing to develop a professional and personal network of friends and colleagues inside their organization

for as long as their work experience stays fully remote.

Personally, I hope that when this is over and we have an opportunity to return to a physical collaboration model, that even those who love work from home the most will remember to 'pay it forward' to their junior peers, and return to the office - even just once per week - to provide junior hires with the same opportunities we had at the beginning of our career.