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by zeroego 1451 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
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.
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.
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.