Leading junior developers remotely

It was March 2020. Product owner came to me and told me that we don't enough developers to complete a very important feature before July 2020. He told that we are going to bring 2 developers from other team to speed up the work. He also told me that I have to lead them not code. Because, I was supposed to code on some other project.

I had team leading experience in my previous organizations. But, this time was different. It was COVID-19 situation. I haven't met those two developers in-person. The day they were about to join, The company asked all of us to work from home.

I had to meet and greet with them on Slack and then on Zoom. On our first call, I saw unfriendly and uncooperative behaviour in one of them. I would name them as A and B. A had loud voice and low patience. B was soft spoken and small talker. I did not choose my team, so I had to deal with them anyhow considering the team objective.

A was just out of the college and was not go-getter. Instead to try out, A was rely on me to explain and write some code to make him understand. B was self driven and had analytical brain, plus follows coding instruction as given.

I gauged their capabilities and created stories out of epic given by product owner. Easy and smaller tasks were given to A and difficult ones to B.

I had to be on Zoom meeting with A for more than 2 hours to explain what to do and how to do. And answering questions on Slack. Sometimes slack notifications used to irritated a lot. Whereas B had to come on call once a day and we used to finish it within 10 mins.

A was weak on algorithmic problems, I had to explain him not to use memory & time consuming approach. My air conditioner was broke and summer heat was killing me. At same time, I had to answer some questions. The question being asked were repetitive sometimes, which was the reason for my irritation.

It wasn't that A was stupid, but A's low patience and no one in-person to guide which was making my work uneasy. I tried my best to take A out of code mess to cleaner way writing code. 

I asked B to collaborate more with A, so that it can be helpful in our project completion within timeline. B was a good team player and had good problem skills. Even A has 1 years of experience in coding, but was as smart as a coder with 5 years of experience.

After few weeks, my patience and A's endurance paid off. A was able to finish the task without help from us. Logical approach changed a bit, but not completely. 

After 3 months of hustle, we were able to deliver the project before deadline. A experienced a pressure situation in first 3 months of career and B was satisfied to work on a challenging project. And I got a breather from the roller-coaster ride.