You wouldn’t hire a senior developer without giving them any support or possibilities for growth, would you? Of course not!
We always try to do our best for the people we hire, and yet, many companies hire seniors and refuse to give them the opportunity to be a mentor to juniors, or at the very least, people significantly more junior than them. What’s worse is that everyone seems to be doing it out of a fear of the junior people failing, of not being able to support them in a remote environment, and not out of a genuine dislike of hiring junior people and letting them grow in the company.
I think we are trying to protect juniors from the difficulties of remote work and in doing so, we are not only limiting the career options of those people new to the industry, but also limiting the pipeline of excellent, empathetic technical leaders in our own companies. I’ll give you this and other good reasons to bring more juniors into your remote organization, with real-world examples of how juniors were critical to my career and the careers of other people I worked with closely over the years.
I will go into other reasons why your remote teams would benefit from having more junior devs, (it’s not just mentoring!), what the common blockers to hire them are, and how to get over those blockers.
