throwaway account because... reasons. I've been really struggling with my junior recently. He joined the company during the first lockdown and so has been working fully remotely. It's been nearly two years now and I get the feeling he hasn't progressed anywhere nearly as much as I would of expected. He's extremely slow completing tickets and when he does, the work seems very sloppy. The thing is he's remote so it's very hard to gauge if he's slacking off or really struggling. By being remote he's missed out on so much of the casual conversations about why things are the way they are or when we throw around design ideas or problems with other devs in the room. Day to day I swing from "This pandemic is ruining this guys career" to "has this guy got a second full time job". To loop back to OP. My company doesn't normally hire juniors. I pushed very hard to hire a junior and was eager to give to someone else what the senior at my first job did for me. Fast forward two years I feel burnt out by it and starting to regret it.