[Darkstryder]

Slite is a SaaS company providing tooling for remote work and is a fully remote company itself, all of that since well before the pandemic. So I think calling the article a "hit piece against remote" is unwarranted in this case.

Disclaimer: I have an acquaintance who works there.

[christophepas]

Founder of Slite here, your reply is spot on, we try to be as honest on the pros and cons of remote when we think internally of the future of this market, and when we share our research or insights outside.

It's not all pink, and our mission is very much to remove the roadblocks, so we need to acknowledge the issues that prevent remote from being seen as a no brainer by some teams today.

[zeroego]

Hey there, just wanted to say as a remote junior dev who has been at it for about 10 months now, that I appreciate the article a lot. These 10 months have been the most difficult of my life, professionally speaking. I was assigned a mentor, but there were no training exercises, or "easy bug fixes / small wording changes to make, so they can focus on learning the workflows" quite the opposite actually, and no processes explained or documented anywhere.

I'm a bit older and I couldn't imagine going through this as a fresh grad out of college. I would have loved to have had my hand held in my first days as a dev. I was constantly demoralized by not having the domain knowledge (and not having any comprehensive documentation to learn it), being assigned complicated stories (that even the mid/senior devs had trouble with), and by not having anyone just regularly check in with me and make sure I was doing ok. I would like to continue working remote indefinitely, but man it was really tough starting out as a dev remotely. I say all this to say I do think it's possible to successfully onboard a new dev remotely, but there has to be a plan and resources available to do it and I think your article is a good template.

[christophepas]

Absolutely, we onboarded multiple junior folks over the year, but always put special care there, it needs a very different approach to any new remote teammate.

[zeroego]

Out of curiosity do you foresee Slite hiring more junior devs in the near future? Sounds like an awesome place to work that's more aligned with my goals than my current place of employment.

[ChadNauseam]

I’m a fellow remote juniorish dev (I just passed one year of working in the industry since graduating college). I relate to everything you wrote here.

[zeroego]

It's rough out here! I'm still very grateful to be in this career and things are (slowly) getting better. If I ever end up in a senior position I will insist on better onboarding practices for junior devs if poor ones exist.

[toolz]

Their evidence that leads to a bold font subsection of "Why junior employees are more likely to fail in remote" is a linkedin and reddit poll with <200 respondents.

I agree this isn't a hit piece, but it is definitely lacking substance to arrive at a controversial conclusion.