[sokoloff]

Some of the issue with junior employees is that what worked before won’t work as well now (or at minimum, won’t work the same way).

When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck.

It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions.

In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”