I cannot imagine how miserable it must be to be a junior being remotely mentored.
In my mind this would only make sense in a scenario where the junior is a motivated hard working person and the mentor, working from home, is someone who doesn't give a shit. But the root cause here isn't the wfh.
One of the perks being in the same space is that it is much easier to clear up misunderstandings. Things like body language, facial expressions really do play a huge part in our communication. Especially if people are from different cultures. Also, a lot of juniors are already nervous when they start so having people with friendly body language around helps.
Being in the same space and doing shared activities also helps people gel together. Looking back at my days as a junior and as buddies later, I just don’t think zoom meetings are equal to shared activities like morning coffees and occasional table tennis to blow off steam. I don’t think I would have gotten along with some people if it weren’t for shared experiences in the office.
All this being said, I really do love wfh though. So I often think about how we could get the best of both worlds.
Anyway, my previous company was about 100 people and purely remote. I had a brilliant manager who taught me a lot. We did pair sessions and worked through stuff together via Zoom or Google (really can’t remember what video chat we used). Remote was never a problem.
Now I work at a company of about 200k and I’m in the office most of the time. Every single one of my brain cells is atrophying. I haven’t learned anything in the 18 months I’ve been here.
And actually in well documented places with pointers to sandbox environments (which remote tends to force better docs for both), it's great to let the juniors play and ask questions on missing and poorly documented items - reproducibility and learning is improved.
And I've worked too many in-person places where mentoring is random, unplanned and ineffective because of it.
My company didn’t do anything differently to help people starting out as sdes and it still worked.
Of course every person us different so some will find the in person easier but I think most could make it work remotely. Especially if a company invests in helping to make it work.
If you are forced to suddenly teach everyone remotely due to a global pandemic, it probably won't work as well...