[lopkeny12ko]

You cannot blame company policies for the poor performance or low motivation of individual junior developers. My team has hired multiple junior developers in the last 2 years, all of whom are 100% remote, and they've been doing excellent.

[zeroonetwothree]

I’m going to trust Meta’s sample size of probably thousands over your sample size of “multiple”.

I had six juniors join my team remotely and three are amazing, two are ok (do useful work but need handholding), but one is pretty bad. However I don’t know how that compares to non-remote hires so it could be that it’s worse.

[november84]

I totally get that, but it’s important to look who’s providing the information. I highly doubt the analysis was independent of bias.

We know many companies want to push for back to office work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard…

Some food for thought.

[marcosdumay]

This is really not a matter of sample size.

If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will need to think about sampling, be careful about what you test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you don't know.

Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a huge company messing with the lives of many people and claiming they know exactly what they are doing.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

I think they are not blaming individual junior devs, they are saying across their hires, they noticed a trend.

You said your team hired multiple junior devs, I am gonna assume its less than 10 hope that is fair assumption. Meta has hired almost 40,000 people since 2019. Even a conservative estimate of how many were engineers, and distribution of junior and senior roles. I think it is fair to say they probably had enough people to draw meaningful conclusions.

Perhaps individual teams, with careful hiring practices and team fit interviews can make sure juniors thrive even in a remote position. But on average, larger companies cannot be only staffed by super teams, and sometimes that means some people suffer to make sure the median employee has the best chance to succeed.

Its not too far from having junior limited to some staging environments instead of production. Some juniors might be ready for the big leagues, but giving the keys of prod to any junior will probably cause some headaches on companies with 80,000 employees like Meta.

[karmelapple]

+1 to this. Our small company hired our first full-time junior dev last year. They’ve been a fantastic addition to the team. We have also been doing 100% remote for over a decade, so our existing processes helped I imagine, too. But I’ve got another data point that a junior dev can certainly thrive doing 100% remote work.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's easy to assume other companies are incompetent, and your company is amazing.

But it's harder to onboard at a company like Facebook than at a startup. Every company could have better processes - but when it takes months for even top-tier talent to be able to do basically anything - it can be extremely helpful to be in person during that time...

And, sure, everyone is different. I'm sure some special snowflake will reply - but it isn't for me!! I'm speaking in general - as Facebook is...

[noisenotsignal]

Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.

[myth_drannon]

Right, and it's up to the team to go above and beyond to help them. Managers and senior devs need to step up and get involved more with mentoring and helping.In the office you can gage stress levels of someone who is stuck,lost and not asking for help. In remote they will just hunker down and work nights to try to push through, it happens more to junior than to senior (usually).

[bproven]

yep - it is the culture that determines this. Ive worked at full remote companies that took time to mentor juniors and it worked fine