I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus.
For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.
They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.
Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.
Agreed, however some teams/orgs have skewed ratios such that the senior job basically becomes fielding interrupts all day and then coding at home after dinner.
Fine if thats the job, but don't call it senior engineer and treat as an IC role that is also expected to clear lots of Jiras (hey! seniors should be able to do 3X story points if juniors are doing X.. what are we paying them for!).
A lot of "flat organizations" delude themselves with 30:1 IC:manager ratios where what's really happening under the hood is - 5 seniors on the team each fielding 5 juniors worth of interrupts all day, with 1 manager on top whack-a-moling crisis management.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.