[gbpz]

My previous team had zero problem onboarding people remotely. The steps are extremely simple:

1. Have a collaborative culture. This is difficult at some places. But an environment where people are free to spin up zoom meetings and ask questions goes a long way. RTFM culture is the worst. Yes there are devs who don't bother reading the docs, but I find they often don't know how or where to look.

2. We had watercoolers in the afternoon. People could just chat. It may seem like a hugely ineffective process BUT... about 30%-40% of the time it would be about work. Knowledge would be distributed to multiple people, social bonds would form, and blockers would often be resolved. This led to high trust teams with multiple SMEs some of whom were "JR" devs.

3. README or wiki. Currently working at a FAANG company and several repos have no README. Wiki's are out of date. Knowledge is fragmented. I don't blame other devs, but it's kind of insane how much technical debt there is.

[commandlinefan]

> Have a collaborative culture. This is difficult at some places.

Yeah, because that sucks for the senior engineers who are expected to spend 100% of their time mentoring junior developers, 100% of their time attending status meetings, 100% of their time closing JIRA tickets and the other 100% of their time fixing production issues.

[gbpz]

I would agree, but if you're mentoring right a lot of those problems get delegated to the junior engineers - not status meetings though.