[saiya-jin]

I think you both are correct. Take normal graduate, split spacetime continuum into 2 parallel universes, and let 1 join same company remotely and onsite. Unless given company/team is very toxic, graduate who has gazillion questions every day and gets stuck even more will get them answered more easily if he just comes in person to seniors, rather than chasing calls/chats every time he is stuck or uncertain how to decide.

Quick brainstormings, pair programming. I mean its not up to discussion, real world on site is more efficient. Now from perspective of senior always bothered by those pesky juniors with their stupid questions, loud environment etc. its a different story. Company can set itself up to be much more open to fully remote, but its a conscious and continuous process that needs to be accepted by all seniors, people tend to revert to previous way of working.

Personally, I can see this also for seniors who are also onsite. In truly global teams, you are constantly chasing people and teams to do their work, approve processes, deliver stuff etc. Compared to person X who will respond to your email/chat in 4 hours it takes 1 minute including walking to get feedback, understand problem, manage expectations, push things further etc.

[I_AM_A_SMURF]

It really depends on a lot of factors. For somebody who's shy / socially awkward / introvert (lots of those in tech) it's _a lot_ easier asking questions in chat than in person, especially a shared chat with not too many people, it's also way faster than walking across the hallway to catch the person that you need.

In my experience coaching many young engineers in person and remote, the problem is not so much that it's easier for them to ask questions, is that they don't ask questions, like, at all. They are too worried to sound/appear dumb, even when all the senior/staff engineers are super nice. And in a way I understand that, they are unproven, they have to show their worth to everyone else.

My theory is that the idea that early career people don't do well remote is that it's easier for the senior people to forget about them and not check up on them regularly to make sure they're progressing. If a person is sitting close to you and not making progress it's a lot harder to miss. Also the casual "hey everything OK with your problem?" is a lot easier in person than online. That being said, with some adjustments it really doesn't take too much effort on the Tl/Manager side to make sure junior folks don't get stuck.

I've lead a few teams remotely now and the most successful ones were the ones where I started checking up on the most junior ones often, as often as every day, just asking low-key questions like "hey do you have any questions for me? are you stuck anywhere?" for a bit, just to make sure they were feeling OK asking me when they had a problem, and re-routing them to the right person as needed. After a while they feel safe and start doing it on their own, but it might take a while depending on the person.

As an experienced person, I can chat with anybody at the company within minutes, it's so much more productive than chasing somebody in the office (which could be easily 10~20min walk away).

In person is way better for socializing, creating team bonds, etc. but you don't need that every day, a yearly/quarterly team/company offsite is sufficient.

This is my perspective working at companies that are big enough that they would be global anyway. For a smaller company I can see the argument of having everyone in the same office, but even then your giving up a lot to make up for that (commuting, walking around finding the right person) and I don't think that scales well beyond the 1000 people mark.