Mentorship is hard to come by or even give when the common advice for ambitious people is to job hop every year or so basically - what kind of a professional relationship can develop within maybe just a year that is of substance? This is easy enough to do in an area with a lot of good tech companies and community to develop a stronger professional network but is really unlikely to happen in a lot of places with maybe a handful of employers with any decent size (software) engineering organization. I lived in Asheville, NC (about as isolated as any rural area in the US) for a bit and I was a little surprised to see I got more LinkedIn job recommendations for mechanical, chemical, or other “hard sciences” type of engineering jobs because Greenville, SC was the closest metro area evidently and even the Google and Apple datacenters were pretty darn sparsely staffed. Most of the software community there worked remotely as can be expected, but I was glad to see how talented and passionate everyone I met was. Thing is, almost everyone there had developed their careers before moving - staying put in an area that can’t reward you is obviously not good for a career but this begs the question of why decently talented people do not move to better opportunities.

But really, moving makes it super hard to build a good professional network and you have fewer opportunities as a result which causes a downward spiral of lack of improvement in skills. I’m really not that much better at anything besides rote memorization of some trivial technical facts than I had 10 years ago because I never have been challenged technically in that time period. This causes atrophy no different than lack of physical exercise. And unless you work another 20-30 hours / week outside of work you’re not going to catch up with those that do spend their time at jobs that appropriately challenge them and help them realize their full potential. Hence, location is among the more important factors as someone early in a career I’ll stress and is precisely why moving to some high cost area is worthwhile... if you can make use of what they have to offer.

Most of the advice I give to my juniors isn’t about code itself as much as larger design and architectural patterns that can cause years and years of effort to go down the tubes or require millions of dollars of human effort to correct. These are the decisions that cause major rifts even for architects. Heck, some older programmers I’ve worked with refused to write tests because they thought they’re a waste of time / crutches - does this mean I am a bad student or something? Not necessarily.