On Working In-Person
I originally wrote this post on April 5th 2022, the day I first met my co-workers at my first internship.
I’ve been on co-op before, back in my previous degree. My first stint was as a research assistant at a research institute in Singapore, and my second was as a clinical research assistant. Both were in in the era of pre-COVID, and naturally, they were in-person. But I did my very first technical internship pretty much entirely virtual. Today, after 7 months, I met my teammates for the first time in-person. It was also the first time I saw my office. Almost immediately, I could tell the difference in team dynamic. And I liked it.
To be fair, in our team of about 8 people, more than half were meeting in-person for the first time. So there was an air of excitement and novelty that was present, that may not have been around had we previously already met. But throughout the day, little things kept coming back that reminded me of how easy things can be when working in-person. Primarily, the ease at which questions can be asked. Just in general, the barriers to speaking with people are lowered significantly. Plus, you can eat together with your coworkers without it being a whole thing! That might seem simple, but that was a real fun thing for me, haha.
I know that a lot of students now want remote internships. I do think that having that in-person connection, at least for an onboarding period, is pretty crucial. And ironically enough, though one might think that technical internships lend themselves well to remote work, I’d argue it’s actually harder than non-technical internships. There’s just too many things you may need help with for it not to be a hassle conducted virtually.
Setup is always a pain – how do I connect to this database? I need a connection string? What’s that? Where do I find that? Oh, XXX portal? What’s that? Oh, I don’t have access to this? Gotta get someone to approve my access?…Okay, I got access and have the string, now where do I put it? Config file, where is that? What line do I edit? Hmmm…it’s not running…oh, I copied the wrong access key?.
Some problems, you just won’t know the answer to, because you’ll lack the context for why things were done a certain way, and there will be no source available to learn about this context, or (at least in my case) you might be too junior to know where to look to discover the context.
During my internship, I was lucky enough to be part of a team that valued communication, and was open to pair programming. We had an “office zoom,” (the tagline was “it’s just like the office!”) where anybody on our team could pop in throughout the day to ask questions to unblock themselves, or just hang out. It was also completely voluntary, so if you didn’t want to join and just wanted to focus on your work, or not socialize, that was completely fine too. This zoom room facilitated a lot of really important conversations that I feel like would have been the “water cooler” conversations you tend to hear about when people talk about the importance of being in-person.
This was also incredibly helpful for providing a venue for me to ask questions and spend time with my coworkers. As you might imagine, I basically spent most of my day in there. In fact, most of my day was sitting in that room, slowly building up questions I wanted to ask, and waiting for the more senior folks to pop by (they’d usually pop by late morning, or after lunch). The others on my team certainly hung out in the room a lot, and asked questions of their own, but I definitely took up a lot of time in that room, and I’m grateful that they were willing to spend that time with me.
Even with the support and flexibility of the zoom room though, it was still an approximation on working in-person. A senior developer at my company always talked about feedback loops, and how the key to being a good developer is being able to close those loops as fast as possible, to know what the next correct step to take was. And there will never be a shorter feedback loop than being able to just tap someone on the shoulder and ask them a quick question, get them to point at your screen, and let them be on their merry way. It’s also less annoying than having a bunch of messages you have to type up replies to.
More importantly, I think there’s something to be said about getting to know your coworkers through in-person work. There is an almost intangible effect that being on a zoom call cannot replicate. The ease at which conversation flows on a zoom call versus in-person is leagues apart. When one person speaks, the entire group has to give way, lest absolute chaos occurs. This naturally restricts the flow of conversation in numerous ways, from people not being able to quickly jump in with their ideas and drive the conversation, to even just feeling less willing to speak up in general.
I do wonder how my internship may have differed if it had been entirely in-person, or even just hybrid. While I do think I had about as good an internship as I could have despite the virtual barrier, I suspect it would have been more fruitful in ways I’ll never fully know. I’m reminded of an article Jerry Seinfeld wrote in the earlier months of the pandemic, in response to a LinkedIn post about how New York was now dead due to the waves of people who left the city. While harsh, his point about how Everyone Hates really resonated with me. There will always be reasons why people prefer working remotely, from having less distractions to be able to enter a flow state, greater flexibility in their scheduling, or even just plain not wanting to socialize. But at the end of the day, I think it’s very difficult to replicate the effectiveness of having a team work in-person. Techniques and processes that facilitated efficient in-person working may not easily translate to remote teams, and it takes a deliberate effort from all parties to find the best way of working for them.
I’m biased, of course, because I naturally prefer talking in-person over any other communication medium (I am a notoriously bad texter on any messaging). But I do think there is something to be said for the magic of working in-person. And I’m aware that a lot of this is also coloured by the fact that I’m still very much in the early stage of my career, and benefit more from pairing with others (i.e. I’m usually the one asking the questions and having to ask others for their time, rather than having to give up my time to field questions). But at least for me, at this point in my life, if given the choice, I’d prefer having a hybrid or in-person over virtual.