[beachtaxidriver]

I also think that junior new engineers are less productive remote, because they can't absorb the context and experience of their more senior coworkers.

Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.

[Asooka]

Over the pandemic I could closely observe three junior developers.

One was hybrid remote / on-prem with on-prem menotring and sadly they turned up not to meet our standards. I don't think the work arrangement impacted them.

One was fully remote with their mentor fully remote as well and we hired them full-time.

One was fully on-prem as much as they could, with a mentor who was almost fully remote. They were also hired full-time.

So my experience is that there is no correlation between bringing junior developers up to speed and exactly where they work from. Communicating face to face and communicating remotely are different and require different skill sets, but that is down to the abilities of the individual mentors assigned to the individual juniors. Or put another way - every combination works best for some people

[sitkack]

> can't absorb the context and experience of their more senior coworkers

How so? What prevents that? I don't believe it, but people like saying it without evidence.

[ChuckNorris89]

My own experience as a junior during the forced WFH transition of the pandemic is, albeit anecdotal, proof for me.

It sucked. If the company doesn't shift and completely overhaul its entire culture from the ground up to full remote including junior mentoring, it's difficult to see, especially from the managers and senior perspective who already know the "games" of the organization and the know-how to get their work done and be productive while advancing their career, just how much knowledge and development potential I missed out on as a remote junior.

When I was in the office, I would pass by a coworkers and see some new development environment or tool on their monitor and I would ask them "Hey, sorry, what's that <thing> you use", "Oh yeah, it's a tool for doing X, it's very useful, you should try it.", "Oh neat, thanks". When we switched to remote I would have no way of seeing the tools others use that later help me also be more productive.

Or when two of the most senior colleagues who sat next to me would be discussing some very high level technical stuff together, I would sometimes listen in and learn something new and sometimes ask them questions later about it and even volunteer to work on that if they need help. With the switch to remote, I have no chance of hearing 1:1 technical discussion calls between the seniors and find out new things or challenges they face.

Basically, I was missing out on a lot of ideas, challenges, solution, technical development know-how, and became this anonymous avatar that needs to takes Jira issues as input and produce Gitlab merge requests as output, pigeonholing myself and stagnating my growth both as an engineer and inside the organization.

I suspect these issues might be less common in startups and companies that have been built from the start as distributed remote, but are probably very present for older organizations that have always ben in the office, and switched to hybrid or remote because of the pandemic.

[ProZsolt]

I can completely understand your position, but it shouldn't be like that.

I started my carrier as a remote employee before the pandemic. Pairing helped a lot to learn how others are working. Most of the technical discussions where public. Usually on slack or on GitHub (via RFC PRs). If somebody scheduled a meeting usually included the whole team as optional and encouraged juniors to listen even if they can't contribute. We planned our sprints together so everybody know what the team is working on.

On the other hand I joined a new company during the pandemic which had similar issues. I wanted to help solve it, but they didn't even acknowledged it.

[ChuckNorris89]

>but it shouldn't be like that

Many things in life and in the world shouldn't be the way they are, but the reality in the field is very different and most of the time there's not much we can do about it.

Pairing was never a thing in any company I worked (in Europe).