[rosywoozlechan]

Remote work is really rough with junior engineers. I'm trying really hard to help people but it comes in PR comments and scheduled zoom meetings instead of how it came for me, conversations over lunch, someone standing over my chair when I ask them for quick help. It's been so hard to scale people up. If I were a junior engineer I'd want return to office, but they seem to be the least likely to want it, because they've never had to come into an office before.

[noisenotsignal]

As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away.

I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person.

An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)

[un_montagnard]

Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.

[noisenotsignal]

You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating.

If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now.

[0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

[un_montagnard]

It's much easier to switch between driver and navigator when doing pair programming at the same keyboard.