How do you know how to recreate some of the in person collaboration if you are not seeing it yourself?
I have a lot of engineers reporting up through me that started their academic, and now professional careers post-covid. We are all still "partially remote", and will be for the foreseeable future - we still try to come in on Wednesdays for those of us that enjoy interacting with another adult live and in person.
In summer 2021 I was in office looking at (blue) prints in a common area, everyone for the most part was still working from home, and I saw a feature callout that seemed way too bogus/weird to be coming from the lead design engineer, so right there I picked up the phone and conference-called the lead engineer and hashed it out - to the conclusion that yeah it is a weird way of controlling things, but its nuances actually work better than the alternatives.
It wasn't until a bit after hanging up and going on with my business, that I realized one of my fresh college grads was sitting in a cubicle just next to the area I was sitting in... and while he has never mentioned it, that was likely the very first time in his professional life that he heard two senior level engineers parse through a difference of opinions toward a successful conclusion.
I'm a Director now days, and I see the difference between "pre-covid" employees and "post-covid" employees grow every single day, and it concerns me - and not from an "I'm their boss" perspective, but rather, from the perspective someone that genuinely loves the art of engineering. I am very open with my team that what I want is to progress our craft, and that our company has already outlasted 3 generations of employees and will long outlast us - how how we move the field of engineering forward will last forever... Melodramatic, I know.
So much engineering, and just corporate live in general, is learned through osmosis. You learn how to lead by watching others lead. You learn how to navigate healthy conflict (which at the core is what engineering is - we progress our craft by being proven wrong) by watching others model the appropriate behavior live and in-person. When we first went home for Covid March 2020, I missed being able to just speak questions out loud to my cube mates so much that a few other engineers and I would call each other at ~8:30 in the morning and mute ourselves, and whenever one of us had a question we'd just unmute and ask, have a short discourse, and then back to mute and eventually end our ~8 hour phone call at the end of the work day.
I don't see our post-covid people having buddies like that anymore. My cross-functional peers and I are having to teach and mentor concepts that were never even topics of discussion pre-covid. These fresh engineers are so smart, but they are lost - like a baby animal without a parent to imprint.
ortho_engineer t1_jdfz2uy wrote
Reply to comment by jared555 in Apple employees face reprisals, possible termination over return to office policy by OutlandishnessOk2452
How do you know how to recreate some of the in person collaboration if you are not seeing it yourself?
I have a lot of engineers reporting up through me that started their academic, and now professional careers post-covid. We are all still "partially remote", and will be for the foreseeable future - we still try to come in on Wednesdays for those of us that enjoy interacting with another adult live and in person.
In summer 2021 I was in office looking at (blue) prints in a common area, everyone for the most part was still working from home, and I saw a feature callout that seemed way too bogus/weird to be coming from the lead design engineer, so right there I picked up the phone and conference-called the lead engineer and hashed it out - to the conclusion that yeah it is a weird way of controlling things, but its nuances actually work better than the alternatives.
It wasn't until a bit after hanging up and going on with my business, that I realized one of my fresh college grads was sitting in a cubicle just next to the area I was sitting in... and while he has never mentioned it, that was likely the very first time in his professional life that he heard two senior level engineers parse through a difference of opinions toward a successful conclusion.
I'm a Director now days, and I see the difference between "pre-covid" employees and "post-covid" employees grow every single day, and it concerns me - and not from an "I'm their boss" perspective, but rather, from the perspective someone that genuinely loves the art of engineering. I am very open with my team that what I want is to progress our craft, and that our company has already outlasted 3 generations of employees and will long outlast us - how how we move the field of engineering forward will last forever... Melodramatic, I know.
So much engineering, and just corporate live in general, is learned through osmosis. You learn how to lead by watching others lead. You learn how to navigate healthy conflict (which at the core is what engineering is - we progress our craft by being proven wrong) by watching others model the appropriate behavior live and in-person. When we first went home for Covid March 2020, I missed being able to just speak questions out loud to my cube mates so much that a few other engineers and I would call each other at ~8:30 in the morning and mute ourselves, and whenever one of us had a question we'd just unmute and ask, have a short discourse, and then back to mute and eventually end our ~8 hour phone call at the end of the work day.
I don't see our post-covid people having buddies like that anymore. My cross-functional peers and I are having to teach and mentor concepts that were never even topics of discussion pre-covid. These fresh engineers are so smart, but they are lost - like a baby animal without a parent to imprint.