I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of

I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well. That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc. The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors. So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.