I strongly feel your first point -- there's been a weird ethos at the FAANG company I'm employed at where you are encouraged to solo-learn, despite many others on the team who could share the learning and create camaraderie in far less time. But if you want to do that, you're seen as a "lesser" engineer -- so instead, everyone struggles for months (average onboarding time is 4-5 months) and it's often repeated that you won't know what you're doing for the first 3 years.
The very notion that you can’t lean over someone’s shoulder and say “hey can you help with something” is a massive failure of remote.
The subtlety of human communication and merits of simple vulnerability exchanges really detracts from team development.
And whilst I do get to see my team - whenever we meet it’s to discuss the “big” stuff and not actually do our daily work, thus we don’t get to learn from each other.
