Comment by beyarkay
(author here) I'm not sure I agree. I certainly think that screen sharing is better than nothing, but remote screen sharing is a strict subset of what you can do while in-person. Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.
I can't describe how many times I've been saved days of work because a senior casually asked what problem I was working on as we both waited in line for a coffee, and they were able to point me in the right direction. As described in the essay, the novice doesn't know when to ask for help.
There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.
> Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.
You've outed yourself as a young person here, because young people have this social fear of messaging senior engineers. Messaging at work doesn't need to be synchronous like in personal communication. Messaging at work matures into optional asynchronous communication for efficiency. See the No Hello (https://nohello.net) protocol.
There is actually a lower bar for quickly bugging a colleague over messaging than walking over to their desk. It's actually impolite to shoulder surf and skim your colleague's email inbox to determine if what they're doing is important. For senior and above levels, reading emails can be more urgent than having an IDE open. There can be production issues, environment issues, vendor tickets, and emails from senior management that are communicated over email. Or they can be submitting an HR form that has their personal details.
Before 2020, software developers in open office environments naturally gravitated to messaging over talking in person, because having no office or cubicle walls means if you're talking out loud at someone's desk, you're bothering others sitting nearby. Sometimes this happens anyway, and it can be hard for some people to read code or emails while listening to colleagues talking right next to them.
> There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.
There is minor degradation in educating novices, like maybe it's 2% to 5% worse, but in open office work environments, the majority of communication is messaging and emails anyway due to lack of privacy and sound-proofing. Screensharing is easier to see than huddling at someone's desk, and quieter for your colleagues next to you who wouldn't hear all sides of the conversation when you're using headphones.