You say "duh" but this is pretty controversial and there's a big push for remote work right now. I'm "pro remote" - my company is full remote, for example. I also think I'd have a much worse career if my first job hadn't been in an office, especially such a cool office with great coworkers to chat with. Being in an office was incredibly motivating and exciting as a junior developer.

Being in an office also made it clear how much I worked. I was there on most weekends and people noticed.

I'm not saying that that's more important than the benefits of remote, but people absolutely do act like it's a black and white scenario.

Conversely, I despise my first in-office experience and it completely turned me off ever going into an office ever again. It was incredibly demotivating to go there when I didn't actually need to - and the idea of 'watercooler creativity' is something I found to be a lie in an office environment. I've developed a real hatred for in-office work as a result of seeing how unnecessary it was when I went remote for two years and was just as productive.

Of course, I'm sure many people have had similar experiences to both of us. I'm only saying that there's a lot of grey area here.

> What you need to solve this is merely competent managers/mentoring culture.

I see this claim thrown around frequently as if finding great managers or building a great management culture is an easy thing to do. A great manager in engineering needs to be good at engineering and good at management. It's hard enough to hire for one or the other, let alone both.

Absolutely. And giving managerial duties to your best developers is a double-edged sword that needs to be wielded carefully.

Can you provide some links on how to support junior employees while totally remote? I've struggled mightily with it and a lot of the most pro-remote teams I'm familiar with most don't hire juniors

Maybe I should make a blog post... but here are my suggestions:

1. It is now vitally important to have a clear, mutually agreed upon 30/60/90 program the junior is aware of. These need to be measurable, achievable goals, with specific seniors to reach out to to accomplish. The seniors should also be aware and consenting to play as mentor.

2. Senior engineers should proactively pair program, review, or otherwise attend to the junior as much as the junior is comfortable with. (If the junior's discomfort with mentorship gets in the way of their growth, we need to manage the junior. This shouldn't be mistaken for a junior that doesn't need the mentorship and would understandably find this intense attention to be smothering.)

3. The entire team needs to be aware of onboarding the junior. Expect velocity to slow noticeably for a little bit, until the junior is able to do minor bugfixes and tool building, then slow again when the junior takes meatier projects like features.

It takes more than competent managers and a traditional mentoring culture. Everybody has to be as receptive to new employees in remote as they are to new employees on site. That is remarkably difficult to do when, at best, you see the new employees during meetings. When people do make a point of reaching out to remote employees, it also tends to be more artificial than organic.

It's very obvious that people do better getting introduced to new environments and cultures when they're physically present.

Imagine thinking that a Zoom meeting with a few french people is the same as moving to Paris.

My experience is that any comment on this site that includes the words merely, trivially, obviously, or simply is best ignored, including mine.