[Throwawayabc123]

Throwaway account.

In order to stay price competitive in our industry, we need to use a mix of junior, intermediate, and senior talent.

We have never found a junior or newly-intermediate candidate successfully work remote. Part of the point in having senior people is for them to be available to guide the less learned staff, so it makes no sense for them to all be remote too.

To be fair, for the right senior staffer, we would be willing to consider 100% remote. For the right intermediate staffer, we would be similarly be willing to consider a split onsite and telecommute arrangement, or other flexible scheduling options.

[aggieben]

Have you considered letting your senior people, whom you apparently trust to be remote, mentor your juniors remotely?

[snuxoll]

This is what we do, we have 3 senior developers, 2 intermediate level developers and 3 juniors on our team. Even before we hired the juniors we ALWAYS had GoToMeeting up and conversed throughout the day and worked together on projects, it's more imperative with the Jr's so we'll usually pair someone up 1:1 with them on a separate call to mentor them on a project. We haven't felt a need for a physical office except as an occasional meeting space (which is why we are working on getting one built-out in the city where the majority of our remote team lives).

[mountaineer22]

So you do remote pair programming?

I have found this to be quite productive.

Real-time communication with voice, but also the visually shared WIP.

Is this your experience?

[snuxoll]

Yes, everyone on our team has a GoToMeeting license, throughout the day most of our team is pair programming using the screen sharing functionality or talking with our users about issues or doing UAT before deploying a new build.

Personally I'm not a fan of pair programming, I don't like shoulder surfing, but it's an invaluable tool for mentoring the juniors so I still participate when I'm not working on one of my more niche responsibilities I don't share with the rest of the team as much (DevOps, Salesforce developer, DB developer, business analyst, etc.)

[Throwawayabc123]

Yes. We have found it is very frequently no where near as successful as in-person mentoring.

[mountaineer22]

What is the team size?