A great write up on working remotely: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/08/a-year-of-working-remotely I just have one doubt in his article, how come hiring remote junior devs is hard for the team?

@silly-train-46493 Yes. My first two startups (non remote), we could only afford to hire people fresh out of college. I think we interviewed 110 odd people to fill 3 roles. 😕 They were great hires and were with us till the very end 🙂 Regarding remote, I agree with the author. It is difficult to hire junior people - primarily as he puts it, you need to paddle your own canoe. While it is not impossible to hire junior folks or people fresh out of college, they would need to be quite into the developer culture and already be experienced (code-wise) for us to consider. In my first remote job, my boss had ~ 20 years of experience. I was 12 years exp at the time. At my current job, our average years of experience around the team is about 13 years between 5 tech folks. I think with senior folks, they have maturity to be productive and you need to spend a lot lesser time guiding them, etc.

But don’t you think so this is kind of disheartening for the juniors and also, at the same time “only hire senior” thing 😕

@silly-train-46493 at my previous startup we worked with lot of junior folks and except for one they all needed managing. I have similar experience working earlier in a larger org. The ratio has been pretty much similar. Many folks do not enjoy managing others, self included. I spent some time at my previous startup trying to actively avoid managing one 🙂 However, I don’t think all remote companies would discriminate because lot of them have the manager, goals and outcome setup done, so ideally it shouldn’t be a problem. Also I think I have seen Dev roles which do not ask for a lot of years of experience. Finally if you can share examples of your experiences of working without supervision, I’m sure you can create a great case in addition to the quality of your work

@silly-train-46493 I don't think it is a discrimination per se. It is just a matter of convenience. Hiring, like marriage, is of entities (company and you) -- because you guys are at a particular point in your life. If the company is profitable (or well funded) and can afford good salary, it would want to hire the best people - which unfortunately, tends to many times be experienced folks. If I am just starting up, I can pay lower, I would be happy to hire junior folks which I know I have to train. In my first startup when we hired college freshers, we paid them salary and trained them for 3 months on side projects before we could bill for them. The way to beat this ofcourse is to have something to show. For example, creating side projects while in college - putting it up on Github, etc. costs nothing and shows passion. I would happily hire a junior developer who shows drive and attitude even with lesser experience. Luckily, we are in an industry today in which creating work requires only passion and nothing else. Imagine if you are a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer or any other non IT field, it is much harder for these guys to prove themselves.

@many-minister-78351 I don’t have much experience to actually comment as this august, I just completed my first year in the industry 🔥

except for one they all needed managing

BTW I didn’t get what you are pointing out here. What do you mean by managing, till now I have only switched one job and in my last company I had lot of issues with management but that was another issue(not like I am not able to do the work, it’s like they just needed a senior engineer). @loud-glass-33663 IMO most of the people these days have lot of side toy projects which is kind of give them overview of the tech always.

trained them for 3 months on side projects

Also, IMHO people these days can start pretty easily as the getting started with something these days with any tech is pretty easy until or unless a job required a lot of thinking work. People can start pretty easy in max one week or so. For instance, from my experience before coming to current company I never worked with frontend and I never had any side projects too but getting started with the whole thing took me less than a week as most of the people are helpful and they just directed me to the resource which I needed. The only thing I think is people have prejudice about the juniors a lot and I don’t know how it can be resolved 🤷🏻

Maybe the correct word is guidance instead of management.