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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

I dunno man, having onboarded people remotely (for many years now, due to distributed working) it's much, much harder for a lot of people.

The big problem is that there's a bar to meet for Zoom which is higher than that to ask a question in the office. Rightly or wrongly, lots of people feel this way, and I ended up having to over-schedule meetings to make sure people got support.

Additionally, junior people are much, much less likely to have the space to make WFH effective, so they do benefit from having an office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of WFH, but I'm pretty sceptical of it working for junior people as well as it does for senior. And even then, that difference will cause a bunch of problems.

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I agree with this general sentiment. Many people have an idealized vision of WFH and aren't paying attention to the challenges.

Another factor I haven't seen much discussion of is people with vs without children. WFH with children presents a whole new slew of challenges.

A former colleague of mine has three children and no spare office room in his house, so his work-from-home met with school-from-home. He thought about buying a trailer like those used on construction sites, but those are also not prime office-material. I guess once the children are at school again, he will be happier.

Some people claim they solve this by creating a day-long team meeting and having everybody sit in it with their microphones off and cameras off if they want, creating a kind of oral Slack for quick questions and conversations. Personally, I couldn't stand that. My team tried it for one day, and it was so unpopular, it was never mentioned again. I could only do it if I had a private home office that I never used for anything but my job. WFH has to enable boundaries between work life and home life without creating boundaries between coworkers, and that hasn't been solved yet.

I’ve also on boarded many people remote and in person. When you work for a fully remote company, on boarding is not difficult.

Speaking up on Zoom may have a higher barrier to entry than in an in person meeting (maybe) but asking questions on Slack is much lower.

The great thing about remote first, is that a lot of communication is written and can be referenced in the future, which is a great boon to juniors.

> When you work for a fully remote company, on boarding is not difficult.

This is probably the key, to be honest. The companies where I've done this were not fully remote. I agree with you that conditional on being selected for a fully-remote company, this is fine. My understanding is that these companies tend not to hire as many juniors though, am I incorrect?

> My understanding is that these companies tend not to hire as many juniors though, am I incorrect?

Speaking for myself, I’ve always hired a good mix of jr/sr people. I do always look for devs that have the proven ability to ship (so jr devs with a GitHub project for instance).

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