Comment by atq2119
5 years ago
Training new employees is still quite a bit lower friction with on-premise work. This obviously depends on the kind of work you do, but in my case the work is sufficiently eclectic that even very smart and experienced people tend to take a long time until they have a good level of understanding of the problem domain.
That doesn't mean I'm against remote work, by the way, we do a lot of it. But we need to be realistic about its limitations.
Easy, you have a mandatory 2 week in office period for training and then move to off site. Whichever employee that will be training you will also come train you. The company can even pay for a coworking space that's in between or closer to trainer so they don't need to migrate for the training.
Training a junior dev is going to take a bit more than two weeks.
I'm convinced that remote work is something that works only for some people and some kinds of tasks. Anything that requires a lot of coordination sucks doing remote.
You hit the nail on the head. These types of discussions are sensitive because remote work is sometimes considered to be an opportunity to improve working conditions worldwide and people don't take kindly to push-back on that.
Our startup has gone through distinct phases -- It took us years to find product-market-fit and with that our ability to work remotely has gone through distinct phases that were obvious to the whole team.
At certain points it worked great, but once we moved from the idea testing phase to execution, we wanted to be face to face much more so that we could coordinate our work. Also since new hiring ramped, we have to prioritize face-to-face training.
Remote work is quite reasonable for senior employees that have a demonstrated ability to work independently. In essence, some people are capable to be productive as "independent contractors" even if they're actually a full-time employee, self-managing their time, tasks and coordination with others; and some people can't (yet? is it a stage of career develoment or separate skills?) reliably provide the results that the company needs without a strong management structure doing that coordination, task assignment and information flow for them.
This will never work but if you can do it more power to you. Two weeks is totally insufficient. Then again training is a sucker's game. When they get good, I can just hire them, and not pay anything into training.