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How Will You See My Greatness if You Can’t See Me?
Libby Hemphill
University of Michigan School of Information
1075 Beal Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
libbyh@umich.edu
Andrew Begel
Microsoft Research
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
andrew.begel@microsoft.com
ABSTRACT
Newly hired employees go through a ramp-up period of ac-
climating to their organization. This period, known as on-
boarding, is often stressful and challenging for both the new
hires and their managers. In globally distributed software
development teams, the onboarding process may also be dis-
tributed; new hires may be in completely different locations
than their managers and teammates. We are conducting
a qualitative study of new hires who work remotely from
their software development teams. Our data indicate that
these new hires are impacted by their struggle to get noticed
by their managers and teams during their first few weeks
on the job. In this poster, we offer evidence that remote
new hires are frustrated by their diminished opportunities
to demonstrate proficiency to their managers and are un-
able to observe some important kinds of great work by their
teammates.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management
General Terms
Management
Keywords
software development, distributed work, newcomer social-
ization, computer-mediated communication
1. INTRODUCTION
The rise of globally distributed software development has
exacerbated problems associated with socializing newcom-
ers into an organization. According to a popular theory
by Van Maanen and Schein[4], newcomers must learn their
functional tasks (how to do their job), the hierarchy (the org
chart), and their social network (who they meet and work
with to get their jobs done). Other studies, which built on
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Van Maanen and Schein’s original theory, found that social-
ization tactics can influence newcomer adjustment [3, 7]. In
the new Microsoft Canada Development Centre (MCDC) in
Richmond, British Columbia, new developers and testers are
working remotely from their managers and the rest of their
teams who are located in the same time zone in Redmond,
Washington, USA, about 120 miles away. Their remoteness,
both physical and social, aggravates the issues are already
found in distributed development such as conflict caused by
a lack of shared identity and context [2], lack of awareness of
teammates’ activities and difficulty with work coordination
and consensus-building [1], and readiness to use collabora-
tion technology [5]. The data we report here describes a
specific set of problems of not seeing or being seen – observ-
ing and demonstrating great work. New hires are excited
to be working at such a large company and are anxious to
start completing tasks and to prove themselves. Engage-
ment in social practices helps employees demonstrate their
knowledge [6]. New hires at MCDC have trouble seeing
and being seen by their teammates and managers because
they are remote, and available collaborative technologies are
problematic. These problems frustrate new hires and their
managers and may ultimately impact remote employees’ ca-
reer growth.
2. METHODS AND PARTICIPANTS
We are conducting a qualitative study of four software
engineering teams from a variety of divisions at Microsoft
who recently hired a remote team member. We conducted
initial one-hour long interviews with each manager, mentor,
and new hire and shorter follow up interviews weekly with
each participant. We also spent 10 hours observing new
hires at their offices during their first month of work. All
the new hires in our study are men who have citizenship
in Eastern Europe or the Middle East and do not yet have
permission to work in the USA; they have between 0 and 7
years of software development experience. All four managers
and their teams work in Redmond, Washington, and all four
new hires work in Richmond, British Columbia. Only one
team in our study had more than one remote team member;
all other team members work in Redmond in offices on the
same hallway.
3. FINDINGS
The problems we found for new hires come not from being
able to complete their day-to-day work, but in demonstrat-
ing additional proficiencies and observing what it takes to
become an excellent team member. New hires have been
able to be productive in their new jobs despite their remote-
ness. They are fixing bugs, writing unit tests, and making
satisfactory progress, according to their managers and men-
tors. They are able to participate in most team meetings
using video conferencing. They rely heavily on email and in-
stant messaging to interact with their Redmond teammates.
Our study participants were eager to be perceived as produc-
tive team members, especially during their first two weeks of
work. However, they were frustrated by the length of time it
took to be assigned tasks and participate in team meetings.
Their managers described their new hires as “chomping at
the bit” and worried about new hires becoming bored be-
cause they could not yet work on engineering tasks.
New hires are anxious to demonstrate their profi-
ciencies but run into difficulties getting started.
Some aspects of their first two weeks were unique to their
location and situation as new immigrants to Canada: se-
curing housing, setting up development and test computers,
waiting for access to the corporate network, and waiting for
their phones to be installed. For example, one new hire
asked, “How much time will this take?” while waiting to
get started on his “real work.” Managers were also surprised
by how long these initial steps took. We observed that new
developers tended to underestimate the time it would take
them to complete tasks and tended to worry that they were
falling behind or taking too long. As one manager put it,
“He’s junior, right, so I guarantee his estimate won’t be more
than 2 working weeks. He’ll think he can boil the ocean.”
For remote new hires, the frustrations of not being able to
talk to their managers or to see what their teammates are
doing exacerbated their senses of being behind and unno-
ticed. Our new hires commented that it was frustrating for
them that their Redmond teammates were not careful to
schedule meetings in rooms equipped with video conferenc-
ing equipment, unintentionally leaving them out of those
conversations. Each week, our participants report technical
audio/visual problems, but even when these work as de-
signed, new hires say they are unable to hear all parts of a
conversation.
New hires cannot observe great work by their team-
mates.
Excellence, as defined by the managers, requires that an
employee go above and beyond his regular duties. An em-
ployee may notice a problem in a software application, de-
velop a new prototype, and show it to his team for feedback.
He may“drive a component from (sic) end to end” by pulling
in required people in the component development process,
meeting with others about the component, and holding pre-
sentations about it. These types of activities are difficult for
remote new hires to witness, to learn about, and to conduct.
Managers commented that ideas for this kind of excellent
work is sometimes mentioned in the team’s hallway or dis-
cussed amongst people who share an office. Remote new
hires cannot see the team’s hallway activity, and they share
work space with other remote employees on different teams.
Daily interaction may help alleviate problems from
going unnoticed and not being able to see others’
work.
Managers indicated that they rely on email to communi-
cate about work tasks with their employees, regardless of
where employees are located. One team uses the Scrum
process and a web-based application to keep track of tasks
and their owners. Another team uses an Excel spreadsheet
owned and shared by its manager. The activities that man-
agers expect from excellent employees lay outside these nor-
mal channels. The systems in use do not capture informa-
tion about work on new components or prototypes for tasks
outside the team’s list. This work often lies under the radar
until it has been completed. Because remote new hires are
not able to see or participate in hallway and lunch discus-
sions where many of these ideas are first mentioned, they
are unable to observe this kind of “great” work. The remote
new hire on the Scrum team sees more of his teammates
work than do the other new hires because his team has a
daily standup meeting and includes him via A/V conferenc-
ing. The Scrum team’s manager said, “I’m just so happy
that [our daily meeting] is happening. [The] every day thing
really helps. I feel the benefits.”
4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
We found evidence of specific problems for managers to
observe and new hires to demonstrate excellence in glob-
ally distributed software teams. We also found that new
hires are not able to observe the great work of their team-
mates, and they grow anxious because they are afraid they
are behind or too slow. Future research will further describe
the experiences of remote employees and will explore techni-
cal and organizational remedies for the problems they face
during onboarding. We will explore questions of whether
daily interaction alleviates these problems, how communica-
tion technologies impact onboarding, and what other unique
challenges remote new employees face.
5. REFERENCES
[1] J. T. Biehl, M. Czerwinski, G. Smith, and
G. Robertson. Fastdash: A visual dashboard for
fostering awareness in software teams. Proceedings of
the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems, pages 1313–1322, 2007.
[2] P. Hinds and M. Bailey. Out of sight, out of sync:
Understanding conflict in distributed teams.
Organization Science, 14(6):615, 2003.
[3] G. R. Jones. Socialization tactics, self-efficacy, and
newcomers’ adjustments to organizations. Academy of
Management Journal, 29(2):262–279, 1986.
[4] J. V. Maanen and E. H. Schein. Toward a theory of
organizational socialization, volume 1 of Research in
organizational behavior. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT.,
1979.
[5] G. M. Olson and J. S. Olson. Distance matters.
Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2 3):139–178, 2000.
[6] W. J. Orlikowski. Knowing in practice: enacting a
collective capability in distributed organizing.
Organization Science, 13(3):249(27), 05/01 2002.
[7] A. M. Saks, K. L. Uggerslev, and N. E. Fassina.
Socialization tactics and newcomer adjustment: A
meta-analytic review and test of a model. Journal of
Vocational Behavior, 70:413–446, 2007.
