What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact. I was like a fly on the wall during their discussions just because I happened to be sitting near their desks when the discussion started. Or when there was an outage, I could overhear how they were debugging the issue.
Also, I've run a remote work company over the pandemic. Maybe you don't feel working remotely is different, but many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. In person, you can look at someone, see if they're busy, and, if not, approach to start a conversation. Online, you can never tell if someone is available. There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
> many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online.
Also many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person.
Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people. When I was a junior, a long time ago, I learned most things by trying and studying on my own. I always learned very little from senior engineers directly. I would do a lot better by having them tell me what to look at and exploring stuff alone.
> Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people.
I'm not, at all. In fact, I'm very introverted. I think you're missing a number of nuances to this argument.
It's very true that some people are more comfortable approaching people online vs. in person, but that's actually an argument for in-person work. When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations. You don't need to actively participate in any way. Even if you're more comfortable approaching people online, it's still more overhead to approach people online than it is to sit at your desk literally doing nothing.
Second, saying "many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person" isn't a good argument for two reasons:
1. What you're comfortable with isn't likely to be what's best overall. It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
2. Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin, so if you had to pick one method of work and apply it to the general population, then it would make sense to pick a method that favors extroverts. I'm not saying in-person working favors extroverts. I think the opposite, actually, because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
> When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations.
Those are distractions. Those conversations, for the most part, bring no insight and destroy my productivity. As I said, that's not how I learn. You are applying your personal perspective unto others, but what you are describing is alien to me. I learn by experimenting and exploring on my own.
It's the reason why during most of my professional life I had to drown outside noise with headphones.
> It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
And I got out of my comfort zone many times. Taking on projects that didn't perfectly suited my skills and having to learn new things on the run. Switching roles and finding myself having to take on responsibilities without any proper training or hand over, etc and so forth.
Having my energy and focus drained by navigating meaningless social interaction has nothing to do with "getting out of my comfort zone", but everything to do with being able to maintain the focus I need to be actually productive.
> Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin
I have no idea, and honestly I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think they are the majority in Software Development.
> because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
I don't need work to socialize, when I have the need for socialization. Just make friends outside of work. Find a hobby. There's plenty of people out there.
Clearly we differ on how we feel about approaching people. I’d rather get a simple message. When people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond. Your last line sums up how you feel about remote interactions nicely. I’m sorry, I just don’t find that your feelings about online rejections is a good enough reason to drive into an office.
> And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond.
That's kind of the point though. When you're together, you don't need to think about how to include others in the discussion or talk to your manager. It all happens organically.
> I’m sorry, I just don’t find that your feelings about online rejections is a good enough reason to drive into an office.
Again, this is not my personal feeling. I ran a video conferencing company that served hundreds of thousands of people over the pandemic. I'm telling you the feedback we got from our users. So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?
> There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
If your primary reason for wanting to be in office is fly on the wall lurking and not wanting to feel rejected then those aren't very good reasons. Ask to be apart of solutions, groups, teams, emergency responses and projects. You'll learn 10x as much working with those co-workers to solve the problem than you would by listening to some coworkers doing it.
> So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?
I work in a group of 10 developers and 0 out of 10 want to be in office, but hey, I don't mind if you want to take shots at me. I'm not against working in an office, I just want to have real reasons why it's needed.
> when people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say.
This is the bad part -- the best stuff to learn from has been filtered out. Text is written with a specific audience in mind, and that audience generally isn't students. You can write a second document sure, but that requires dedicated tome to writing a second document, and even then, the author may not know which details are most important for the student to know
Can we chat about a problem I’m having with the dev server?
Or
When do you think you’ll have free time?
Those questions are all direct and to the point. They didn’t start out with “hey, see the raiders game last night, it was crazy. My dog was so excited from all the yelling she jumped on the table and started eating the chips.”
To be clear. We were talking about reaching out to coworkers.
> What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact.
This is why I always ask my coworkers to contact me via “open” channels instead of DMs, preferably async ones like PRs (which can start w/o any code or as very rough drafts). At a well run remote company visibility like this should be even easier than having to happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Also, I've run a remote work company over the pandemic. Maybe you don't feel working remotely is different, but many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. In person, you can look at someone, see if they're busy, and, if not, approach to start a conversation. Online, you can never tell if someone is available. There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.