I had six juniors join my team remotely and three are amazing, two are ok (do useful work but need handholding), but one is pretty bad. However I don’t know how that compares to non-remote hires so it could be that it’s worse.
We know many companies want to push for back to office work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard…
Some food for thought.
If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will need to think about sampling, be careful about what you test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you don't know.
Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a huge company messing with the lives of many people and claiming they know exactly what they are doing.
You said your team hired multiple junior devs, I am gonna assume its less than 10 hope that is fair assumption. Meta has hired almost 40,000 people since 2019. Even a conservative estimate of how many were engineers, and distribution of junior and senior roles. I think it is fair to say they probably had enough people to draw meaningful conclusions.
Perhaps individual teams, with careful hiring practices and team fit interviews can make sure juniors thrive even in a remote position. But on average, larger companies cannot be only staffed by super teams, and sometimes that means some people suffer to make sure the median employee has the best chance to succeed.
Its not too far from having junior limited to some staging environments instead of production. Some juniors might be ready for the big leagues, but giving the keys of prod to any junior will probably cause some headaches on companies with 80,000 employees like Meta.
But it's harder to onboard at a company like Facebook than at a startup. Every company could have better processes - but when it takes months for even top-tier talent to be able to do basically anything - it can be extremely helpful to be in person during that time...
And, sure, everyone is different. I'm sure some special snowflake will reply - but it isn't for me!! I'm speaking in general - as Facebook is...
