I can give two cents as an ex undergrad interested in remote work: I worked onsite after graduation before transitioning to remote for the same company after 6 months.

I found that I was learning a lot less, as you might expect. I missed out on "casual" learning opportunities, like overhearing a new git command or having a quick chat about what a p-value means. And I no longer interacted with the salespeople, scientists, and people in other areas of the business that help broaden my knowledge. Admittedly, this might be different in a remote-first culture, we were quite an open/chatty/collaborative office.

I also made a lot of mistakes as I learnt how to be a good remote worker. It's definitely a skill that needs to be developed, and remote companies would be sensible to prefer candidates with that experience already.

So I'd recommend the pathway of working onsite for a remote-friendly company for a while, transitioning to remote, then using the experience to apply for a remote-first job. It also means you're less committed if you discover you don't enjoy remote work. I discovered I didn't enjoy remote work.

As a hiring manager, I think this is a great idea. Also, a lot of remote-friendly companies will let you WFH a few days per week, which is a good way to get accustomed to it without going all-in, and compare the gaps between your remote vs. on-premises workdays. A good manager at a remote-friendly company can usually also help you learn to be a more effective remote worker.

Just giving my honest opinion here and it may not be what you want to hear, but I personally think you might have a hard time pulling this off. As a junior dev, you are likely to have a lot of questions that are simply easier to answer in person. Sure, you can do video chats and share screens, but people will have an easier time answering your questions in person. If you are able to find something local, you will probably be better off for it when you are first starting out and then you can transition to something remote after you have some more experience under your belt.

I'd be curious to see if others who work remotely feel differently.

The time I've seen this work well was basically where I and a more junior dev hung out on https://appear.in. Most people don't feel comfortable just being on an hours-long video chat work-along though.

In today's job market if you have a "hot" frontend skill you are actually pretty likely to get a gig working from home even as a first job. What's nice about frontend from that perspective is it's complex enough to require time and effort to get up to speed to but also can be "grokked" and worked on without the "enterprise" setup backing it up. And to top that off it's easy to showcase - github/heroku etc.

My older brother taught himself programming during college and was hired on remotely by a company based in SF to do basic dev for them. It wasn't with a major tech firm, but there are definitely remote possibilities out there for a junior dev.

IMO, the remote work that you can get with little actual experience may be very unfun ($15/hr to mess with WP templates).

That wasn't bad for me... I bailed on a PhD in English and was able to spin that up to a stable, decent career in about 5 years and I live 2 hours into the sticks outside of Austin, TX.

But if I had a CS degree and wanted to do work that you can get with that degree moving to a city and getting on on site job would have been a far easier and rational choice.