Such a myopic view. How would you onboard new employees? I started a new job remotely and it was hell. I learned more in the first two weeks in the office than I did in the first 2 months working remotely.
My company has onboarded thousands of people since COVID started, and new employees are as productive as ever. There are enough successful companies that have been remote-only since day one and have no trouble with it. Sure onboarding is hard, whether in person or remote, but that doesn't mean it's an unsolvable problem.
I worked in person for a local govt and remotely for a large tech company with a completely remote team.
The onboarding was terrible for the local govt. Mostly focused on legal aspects-they expected me to have office communication skills off the bat and they offered little for training with mobile techs that I was hired to do (I just did one or two projects and they assumed I already had full experience). The office politics were dreadful. Lots of meetings where things were not decided and often missing people that could answer questions. When you reach out by email, they just visit you by your desk, ask clarifying questions and explain things verbally, often referring to a site that I have to manually type in.
The large tech company had a terrific 3 month onboarding process and I was slowly eased by senior members into taking on the more repetitive work. I learned more about the company in two weeks then I did for my 6 months for that govt. If there is a question, I can reach out by email and setup an inpromptu google meet-links and commands to use are shared in the chat and easily used and tested. Decisions were made and I am building connections in the industry with people in and outside of work that do not work in my area.
By having a comprehensive onboarding plan that is designed to give remote engineers everything that they need to get up to speed and start contributing.
As a counterpoint to your anecdote, I also just started a new job remotely at a company where they invested time and effort into their onboarding experience and it was miles better at preparing me for my role than when I onboarded at my previous two companies in person.
I joined a team that's already all over the place geographically and would spend lots of time on conference calls with other sites. Now we are all just permanently remote and it's fantastic.
You download the repo, learn the stack, look over the codebase, set up the environment (someone might have to help you on this at first with a screen share call if there's no documentation), work on some small tickets, ask questions, and get feedback. Easy. I've always gotten up to speed and productive within a week or two this way, without there being any real onboarding documentation or plan in place to boot. Never had a serious job in an office but I feel like it would have only slowed me down.
Same. When you get a certain level of experience built up, you figure out how to poke around the codebase / pipelines to learn what you need to know. Is it frustrating at times? Sure. But it’s easier for me to retain than reading 3 year old word docs.
I started a new job remotely (pre-COVID, the company had ~zero WFH) and onboarding was very smooth with two in-person interactions to pick up hardware; was contributing in less than two weeks.
