I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own. There are absolutely exceptions who prove the rule but on average we found productivity plummet with remote junior hires and remain similar for folks who have been at the company for decades across all skill levels. Even high-velocity junior folks seemed to be spinning their wheels or getting stuck when remote in a way that perfectly average senior folks did not.
I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.
> I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own.
Are your scenarios the symptom or the cause? Do juniors prefer in office not because of the office or other reasons? E.g. do they have the support they need remotely, is there enough documentation, etc? Usually requiring adhoc in-person interactions is just masking the real issues. The seniors are fine because they've already had workarounds for it.
In talking to the junior folks the two things they bring up are mentorship and socialization.
With mentorship I think you're spot on with regard to adhoc interactions. Senior folks know who, how, and when to ask when they're blocked, or when they need to plant an idea in someone's head. Even though we have daily stand-ups, weekly 1-1 check-ins, and responsive mentors a number of junior folks seemed less comfortable admitting and asking for help when remote until it was too late. My company is overall the best place I've worked but has poor processes in this regard -- it's one of those places entirely run by engineers where everyone is proud of how "flat" the org is which is code for a hidden and ad-hoc org chart. I'll bet manager training and process could have minimized that, but it would be a tougher sell than RTO -- so you go to war with the army you've got.
With regard to socialization, the junior folks seem to hang out with each other after work quite a bit more. We also have lots of social events, presentations, movies, etc during work hours. We had similar sessions set up for remote folks that are well attended but don't seem to scratch the same itch.
Normally I agree, but the differences were particularly stark. After a couple of years the top junior performers were almost all in-person. They were more self sufficient, more likely to still be working at the company, generally made the products they worked on more successful, etc. There were certainly exceptions, but the trend became fairly clear even to remote work advocates. I think that's why we had so few objections to RTO -- even folks who quit over it admitted it was the right choice for our company.
I'd wager better remote processes and culture could have shrunk the gap, and I'm happy so many companies are doing that well, it just didn't work for our company.
I guess we just have different experiences, but I will say that in 20+ years in the industry working in a ton of companies of different sizes, on products used by tens of millions of people... that the highest quality output has always come from remote developers. Some of that is because you can hire world class devs if you look anywhere in the world, but if you hire locally you're tied down to the best devs that can commute to your office, a talent pool orders of magnitude smaller than the global dev community and excluding those people good enough to refuse anything other than WFH.
Totally agree that hiring locally is much more constraining. I'm having trouble filling positions and we're in a major tech hub and can afford to pay near the top of the range for our area so we have it easier than most. Logically our remote competitors should be at an enormous and overwhelming competitive advantage.
But it hasn't happened yet. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen, maybe it's just a matter of time. And personally I hope it does happen, as remote work is better for the planet and regional inequality.
But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person. Maybe they're all behaving irrationally or trying to prop up commercial real-estate or something. But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers, and the latter being slightly easier in person is enough to offset the costs.
> But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person.
That's the trend with the megacorps but almost every startup that's been created in the past 3 years is fully remote or at least remote friendly (for the reasons we've both outlined with regard to access to talent and lack of office overhead).
> But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers.
> I'm having trouble filling positions and we're in a major tech hub and can afford to pay near the top of the range
I have to say that in all of my years of management I've never struggled to hire amazing developers. Some of that is that I will only work on interesting problems and it's easy to attract great devs in that situation. I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to hire local to where I'm physically located though. That would be an issue in both crowded markets like the valley or non-crowded markets (with little local senior talent).
Have you ever tried building a purely remote team? The number one thing I'd recommend is to focus on trust. Remove as much process as possible and trust your team to do what you hired them for. If they're not succeeding, it's possible the wrong people were hired, which indicates that the wrong managers were hired.
I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.