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Ask HN: My son declined intern offer because it's remote – start of a trend?

45 points by LanceJones ↗ HN
Hey HN... my son is 2 years into his Business/CompSci degree and already has lots of summer work experience. He's got an internship offer from Amazon and one from GoDaddy. He just declined GoDaddy because it's only remote, and for a new aspiring developer, he thinks it's important to be around other developers/teams to learn norms and gain "osmotic" experience. Amazon is on-site. With all the attention on WFH over the past 2 years in the tech space, what do you think of his rationale? Could this be what a lot of young developers are feeling?

50 comments

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kube-system
He’s smart. Working remote is tough to do well and many business cultures still struggle with it. I have managed interns in a fully remote environment, and it takes a lot of effort to do well.

There’s a lot to be learned in the first year just through shadowing, which can happen organically if you can just look over someone’s shoulder, but it might not happen if people explicitly need to add you on a Teams call

LanceJones
Ya, he's tried both and definitely prefers on site (at this stage).
discardable_dan
I agree. An intern experience entirely remote sounds like doing grunt work with extra steps.
wolongong942
If it's anything like what happens here in NZ, it's highly likely they're just looking for low/unpaid customer support people. I'm sure there's no shortage of suckers willing to do it.
stevenalowe
At that age I could not wait to get away from my hometown
asdff
OTOH there is this whole contingent of 22 year old developers who post on tick tock about how they love to work remotely from airbnbs in Santorini
screye
I'd say that the junior -> senior transition years are best done in office. In those years, you need hands on mentorship and you build out your early network. Both are best done in person.

As I see it, once you are the senior member of the team & are expected to lead projects, the value of remote work goes up.

ipaddr
If the seniors are home who is the junior interacting with. If the reason seniors are denied work from home because of juniors they may not be so willing to train on top of their core responsibilities
screye
That's the conundrum. The incentives for junior and senior engineers are not aligned.

My intuition is that you need some seniors to be co-located. These are the people who focus on direct mentorship and eventually graduate to people management.

The 10x engineer IC can be remote, as long as they keep some time slots open for indirect mentorship (PR reviews, documentation, SOPs). They'll graduate into lead IC roles.

Upper leadership is mostly brainstorming, in meetings and control their own schedule, so they can probably manage a hybrid few-days-a-week in the office kind of schedule.

rovr138
I mean, it's also GoDaddy for whatever that's worth.

But on the other hand, for an internship, it's good being around other people. Not necessary other employees, but does he have a group of others in similar roles?

I've surrounded myself with other devs for example. If I need to chat, I know the friends and people I can reach out to. If he doesn't have that because where he's at doesn't have it, then it makes sense to get that by going in person.

But I don't think it's a trend. If we are going by anecdotal, there are many more stories of people wanting and going full remote.

Main stories I have seen about going to the office for me sound like the places that went remote only during the pandemic and don't know how to handle it. As someone that's been remote over 10 years, not every company has the tools and structure to handle remote workers correctly. Add to that micromanagers and other things, and it gets worse.

rootsudo
Godaddy is nothing of value lost imo.
FateOfNations
Idk... an internship feels like something that definitely would benefit from in person interaction. There's a line at which it just becomes a short-term position.
anacristina
kudos on your son. learning through osmosis is mandatory i think when you're starting out, the more perspectives and personalities you get to be around the better. they also show you the human you want and don't want to become :)as for the trend, yeah, i guess for juniors that will be the case. It's standard for us that juniors and seniors work onsite, while middle management mostly wfh.
bsjaux628
Amazonian here, opinions are my own, blah blah.

He did the right thing.

While I like WFH, I do believe that interns and juniors should be at the office at least 3 days a week. Being there helps them understand how company interactions work, see senior people work and how they handle themselves, if part of his team is in the office they can see if he is struggling and help him more than just asking on slack. Also, Amazon onboarding is quite overwhelming and I believe that if you see other people using or speaking about the tooling you are learning, it gives you some relief that in time he will too get it.

Apart from that having Amazon in the resume opens the door to easier hiring in other FAANG like places.

It's always day 1.

diebeforei485
Some companies have a strange situation where junior devs (who don't have a good WFH setup due to living in smaller shared housing) go in to the office, but senior devs with comfortable WFH situations don't.
oldsklgdfth
The onboarding is pretty intense. It removes that work from the team, but there is just a huge amount of information that you’ll never see again.
[dead] nnoitra
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rufius
Based solely on my observation as a "staff engineer", the engineers that suffer most from remote work are the junior engineers. They are the ones we've had to help along the most, proactively coach the most, etc.

I think there's something lost with not having junior engineers in office with senior and staff+ engineers.

giantg2
It's much easier to onboard in an office than remote. You tend to learn a lot about the organization and politics via spontaneous discussions.
ipaddr
Like the ones that happen on slack.. that seems to happen more online than in person?
giantg2
I hear much more in person than virtually.
mkmk3
Good choice imo, agree with your extrapolation as well, but for years we've also recognized that SW shops want senior engineers without going to the effort of training juniors. That, to me, hints at how remote work will be treated in this context. I imagine your sons perspective will be commonplace, but it doesn't seem typical that an intern/junior stick with their first shop long term, so I doubt the significance. Would love to gain some perspective if there's disagreement
jdmoreira
You son is young, does not have young children and is most likely looking for socialization at work (like most young adults).
LanceJones
Amazing advice and feedback here -- I'll be sure to share the thread with him later (midterm exams today!).
mjfl
He's right. Proximity really matters early in your career - something I learned the hard way starting out of college remote for 6 months, feeling totally lost, and feeling much better when I finally got on-site.
klyrs
In my very small social bubble, I see some pretty strong correlation between age and desire to work remote/onsite. Specifically, those of us with young families benefit from staying home. People who are younger / single, or have adult offspring, benefit from going to the office. Likewise, there's a split among introverts & extroverts. Aside from insecure managers, the people who have been the biggest boosters of return-to-work are single guys who don't appear to have social lives outside of work.

I expect that the number of fulltime remote workers is going to fluctuate a bit, but it will ultimately stay significantly higher than before the pandemic. I suspect that high real estate prices will motivate budget-conscious companies to take this into account as they plan to expand.

But... echoing some others here, I'd rather have Amazon on my resume than GoDaddy.

codegeek
He is smart and will go far in life. Sorry but if you are just starting out in a field, you cannot do remote (rare exceptions are always there). You need to learn from people face to face and no, nothing beats face to face collaboration and learning.
fleetwoodsnack
Idk, I joined a distributed startup out of school and it gave me access to some of the best in their field from across the world. I learned a lot and there’s little chance I’d have an opportunity to work with that variety of talent if we were all were geo-locked and compelled to go into a local office. Not saying my case is the case for everyone, but I am saying the near-absolutes you’re presenting should be heavily qualified.
codegeek
Yes but how do you know that Geo Locked with colleagues in person wouldn't end up teaching you more ? You don't know what you don't know.
fleetwoodsnack
With all due respect, these hypothetical geo-locked colleagues probably don’t teach at Oxbridge and have multi-million dollar patent portfolios. Short of moving to the UK myself and getting a job in his lab, the only reason I was able to work alongside one of the many of these types of persons was because of remote-enabled work. Believe me, I get what you’re saying on a “gotcha” logical level (because of course you don’t know what exactly could have been), but on a practical reality level, there are some things that in-office just can’t do as easily. There are highly sophisticated fields where remote is simply the best way for minds to come together when bodies can’t or can’t be bothered to.
ipaddr
We've had new employees straight from school no experience in the language excel. Picking the right employees help, you want curious minds and an environment that supports that. A lot of new grads are excelling away from the office.

You never need face to face as a developer. Face to code perhaps.

TexanFeller
I’ve worked at a startup and a large big-tech-lite company during the pandemic and worked remotely off and on starting over a decade ago. I’m no stranger to remote work, but I’ve come to despise it after the pandemic forced it on everyone all the time.

I’ve come to believe it’s absolutely critical for at least juniors to be in-office. The juniors I’ve seen start remotely take far longer to ramp up to speed than in office counterparts. It’s also far more painful for me to help them remotely and communicate via typing than look over their shoulder at their desk. Zoom, Slack, and friends are still a pathetic shadow of what they should be by now, and IMO inadequate.

There are definite social downsides to full remote as well. When I started remotely at my current job my teammates really didn’t engage with me as well as I’m used to. That immediately changed when people finally became comfortable with an in person outing. Having a couple of beers with your colleagues makes you an actual person in their mind instead of some abstract avatar that’s so much easier to blow off.

Full time in person isn’t necessary either for SWEs, but if it were up to me I would make juniors be in-office and have seniors come in for at least a couple of days per quarter.

nyc_data_geek1
All other things being equal, the savvy employee would likely opt for Amazon, one of the highest paying and most innovative tech employers in the world today, rather than GoDaddy, a managed hosting provider which is not any of those things. So, your boy would seem to have a good head on his shoulders.
muzani
Having a mentor also means seeing the behavior and habits they've internalized. The main thing I learned during my junior days was that really good devs knew shortcuts by heart, things like delete line and window snapping. There's work behavior too, frequency of breaks. One of my brightest colleagues would curse a lot at the screen, then watch an episode of South Park every two hours. Or how they use note taking tools.

Debugging is a lot easier in person too.

faangiq
Is this a troll post? “Why I declined McDonalds to work at Amazon.”