My very first gig as a professional software developer was around 2008 for a medium sized publishing agency. During the interview process I had to meet with the IT Director as one of the last bosses to land the job and his very last question before he signed off on it (or not) is a question that I still talk about today:

"You know you have to show up everyday, right?"

I thought it was a silly question for the most part. Of course I know that, it's a job. But the reason why he asked was because I had no prior work experience. Zero. This was my very first job of any kind. And the hesitation in his tone was clear. And he explained it as such.

He said committing to showing up on time every single day for years on end isn't something younger employees really understood. And boy was he right.

From day 1, there was so much more to my 'Developer' job than just development. In fact, I didn't really touch any code for weeks in the beginning. First I had to meet the other departments that I would inevitably end up working with. I had to read hundreds of pages of documentation, attend meetings, take notes, become support for non-technical departments, etc.

But eventually I was allowed to start to contribute code and to have my commits accepted. And it made much more sense after having gone through this introductory phase.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how much I was learning just by being there. Not just from the tasks themselves, but from proximity.

I watched how senior developers handled requests under pressure. I overheard how product managers communicated deadlines. I learned how to read between the lines when QA flagged a “maybe-bug.” None of that was part of a formal onboarding doc. It was ambient learning, absorbed just by being in the room.

Now imagine trying to get all of that through Slack and Zoom. It doesn’t happen as easily.

That’s the gap I see growing in the remote era. We gave junior devs the same tools, but not the same access. Not to human behavior, not to decision-making processes, not to context. And without those, you’re not really learning how to be a developer, you’re learning how to be a ticket-closer.

When I got stuck, I didn’t file a ticket or schedule a 30-minute sync. I stood up, walked five feet, and said, “Hey, can I show you something real quick?”

That simple act, turning confusion into collaboration in seconds, is nearly extinct in remote-first environments. Today, junior developers might hesitate to “bother” someone that they can't directly see. They might sit on a bug for hours, second-guessing their approach, or draft a carefully worded Slack message only to get a reply the next morning: “Looks fine to me.”

That delay compounds. Not just in productivity, but in confidence. You second-guess yourself more. You move slower. And worst of all, you stop asking questions.

It’s not that remote work can’t support junior developers, it’s that most teams haven’t done the hard work of redesigning the mentorship layer. We tossed out proximity and didn’t replace it with anything close to being as effective as being in person.

And no, weekly check-ins and Notion onboarding portals don’t cut it. You don’t get better at coding by reading about someone else’s architecture decisions. You get better by being inside the conversation when it’s happening.

Looking back, I realize that what helped me grow the most in those early years wasn’t coding tasks or assigned tickets. It was everything that wasn’t in the job description: shadowing senior developers, picking up on team habits, and learning how a real software team functions day to day.

Remote work has its place, absolutely. For mid-levels and seniors, it’s often more of a blessing than a curse. But for juniors? It can be a maze with no map.

If we want remote work to actually work for them, we can’t just hand them a laptop and a Slack login. We need to rebuild the mentorship scaffolding from scratch. That means intentional pairing, real-time collaboration, visibility into decision-making, and a culture where asking questions is frictionless.

Otherwise, we’re not really training the next generation of great software engineers. We're just waiting for them to slowly burn themselves out and to become disenfranchised with this technical craft.