Junior remote devs/designers/marketers/sales reps – tell me your experience | Hacker News Reader

Junior remote devs/designers/marketers/sales reps – tell me your experience

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Remotegrad.io is a platform for undergrads and recent grads looking to begin a remote career. A blog will be starting soon, which will feature remote junior workers in short, spotlight interviews. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send you the short list of questions which can be answered in writing or via voicenotes.

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I have about 10 years of experience in software and have been working remote for the last year. While I enjoy the flexibility of working remote, I would not recommend it to junior developers. The experience you get from working in an office and listening in on conversations between senior engineers and management is invaluable. Not only that, but when sh*t hits the fan and the site goes down, watching how the experienced engineers handle and de-escalate the situation is something you cannot learn unless you are there to witness it first hand. These situations are what help you become a great engineer and can only be learned with time and exposure to those situations. Plus the fact that you can easily ask questions and pair program with older developers and learn how they approach and think about problems will pay off tenfold.

Once you've built that foundation, it's much easier to transition to a remote role since you hopefully now have the discipline need to know what features/bugs/projects to prioritize, and how to plan and lead projects. This would be extremely hard for a junior engineer to learn if they begin their career working remotely.

I've considered responding to this question 3 or 4 times, but every time I try, I bump up against the nebulous spetrum of spectrums of knowledge from which we get the terms "junior" and "senior."

My early work experience was not remote, but my most significant work journey in my life has been entirely remote and it started 6 months after I graduated college.

We have to stop thinking about individual experience in absolutes.

Ultimately what matters is whether you can provide the right value at the right time for the right person or group of people.

If you're totally inexperienced, as in, you haven't participated in industry at all, then your success as a remote employee is going to depend highly on how thoughtful the hiring organization is - and I would say that still goes for more experienced people as well.

I started my career as a remote junior dev, but I wouldn't recommend it. it's very difficult to get brought up to speed as a skilled developer in a situation where contact with other devs is minimal.

I do not see junior remote positions very often. It is difficult to do the kind of mentoring necessary for a fresh graduate remotely. I suggest starting out in an office and getting used to professional / office life. Then transition to remote later.

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