[Ididntdothis]

I think remote work is best suited for pretty senior people who don’t need much coaching. So that may shift salaries up a little.

A while ago there was a small discussion in another thread about onboarding remote junior and I got the impression that nobody really knows how to do that well.

[Thorentis]

Yep, this. You don't hire interns, grads, and juniors for remote work. So automatically the average salary is higher for remote work when you limit it to mid level and above.

[thinkharderdev]

Right, and in my experience at least a lot of remote workers are not people who are hired for a remote job but a senior(ish) person who negotiated with their employer to transition to being full-time remote, even if the company doesn't explicitly allow or support remote work.

[ghaff]

Right. I work with a lot of people (and am one myself) who were hired into an office but are reasonably described as remote, whether or not 100%, now.

[paulie_a]

Do most companies even do real coaching? If a company believes their senior people no longer need it. They do not understand coaching.

[Ididntdothis]

Coaching senior people is different. You can coach in small increments. Somebody who is new needs to understand the tech, current implementation of systems and all their quirks and also needs to understand how the company works. That’s a lot to teach at once.

[hrktb]

Remote work doesn’t equate with being hands off or having no coaching.

This is not a pleasant scenario, but some companies will stick monitoring tools on their employees environment, and it becomes the equivalent of the boss sitting behind you but in remote form (then again it won’t mean much for productivity, but almost nobody understands optimizing for productivity anyway)

On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. The real missing bit would be the white board IMO.

[Ididntdothis]

“On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. ”

It’s not that simple with somebody new. If you sit next to them you can see much better whether they are just working through a problem or are stuck and frustrated. With remote people it’s much harder to tell. If my boss doesn’t hear much from me for a week he knows and trusts from my track record that I am working on something difficult but with new people you don’t know their personality and how they they deal with difficulty.

[hrktb]

You are totally right in that there needs to be some prior knowledge of the person to work better remotely. I think it can be done up to a point by a first one or two day of meeting physically and getting to know where and how the person will work, to get a frame of reference.

I also hear that full remote teams usualy do in person meetings at least once or twice a year to ”recalibrate”, on top of there daily or bi-weekly vidro team meetings.

Perhaps the message here would be that making remote work well is not trivial and takes time, money and people knowing how to manage these teams. It shouldn’t be seen as the “lazy” option.

[ghaff]

I know people do it and I was junior at a much different time in terms of communications, etc. But I can't really imagine having spent the first 10 years or so of my career working primarily remotely although I've been basically doing that for a long time now.