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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

> I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.

This is what always jumps to the front of my mind when I read about WFH on software engineering forums.

I'm lucky -- I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics. I never compete for positions, because there is way more work than available skilled labor. Even still, I'll be back in the office. One day the education system will catch up -- or my skill-set will become obsolete -- and at that point having a decade-long in-person relationship is my only bulwark against ruin.

I can't imagine being a SWE working on a standard tech stack without deep personal connections in an application domain and thinking of WFH as anything other than an enormous and terrifying threat.

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WFH absolutely screws over younger people joining an industry. There's nothing like face-to-face learning, and I don't envy anyone who's had to start their career recently.

I've heard this idea repeated several times from people I respect, and thus I take it seriously. That being said, I've seen some contrary evidence. At Innolitics, we've hired several engineers out of college who've blossomed into talented and independent contributors within a couple of years. I'm not sure if we're doing something special or different that has solved the "junior's need face-to-face learning" problem, or if it's not as much of a problem as many people think.

I imagine there’s a big diff between smaller orgs that hand pick each new hire, vs mega corps that have “cohort” models.

What does a cohort model look like? I've never heard of such a thing, at least not in software development.

I just meant places that hire enough new grads to have separate "new grad recruiting" teams.

Some companies do actually have explicit "new grad hire" cohorts with additional onboarding support targeted at new grads -- eg a seminar series or dedicated networking events.

Sometimes it's less formal or there's even no structured support at all.

But, in any case, I'm referring to companies that hire enough new grads each year to have an entirely separate recruiting mechanism for that population. When that's the case, it's just more likely that people are being hired as generic candidates rather than onto particular teams. And when that happens it's easier for people to fall through the cracks, because the direct manager didn't specifically pick that person as a good match for their specific need.

I've had excellent experience working virtually with new hires, but I've also seen a lot of failures.

Mentoring remotely is definitely a skill that us older workers had to be intentional about cultivating in ourselves. The moment pandemic started, I bought a top-of-the-line iPad for whiteboarding, insisted my new hire mentors get the same from the company, and called up a couple old professors to get all their tips on remote teaching.

Hopefully the next generation will have it easier; their mentors experienced remote learning so might be better equipped for remote teaching/mentoring.

I can confirm that starting in a mega corp during Covid wfh was (and continues to be) awful.

> I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics.

Now I'm curious. What is your secret power?

Answering this in any detail would almost certainly dox myself, but I have a PhD in a hot topic that was nascent and not in vogue when I started, so my thesis work was immediately useful to lots of companies and there are very few other people who are experts in this niche. On top of that I have some deep industry background in a key application domain that, again, few other people with phds in my particular niche know anything about. (By deep I mean "hard earned knowledge about all the gritty details", not "spoke with a guy about it in the office once")

The topic is more popular now and funding agencies are starting to fund more graduate training in this area, so my current moat won't exist forever. But by then I'll have dug my current moat deeper, hopefully.

At your place of employment, talk to the business side and learn what they are doing and why. Copy/paste front end javascript workers are a dime a dozen compared to someone with competence and knowledge surrounding the industry. Simplest way is to talk to the product side. People like talking about themselves, particularly when the other person takes an active interest

I'm not really sure this provides a meaningful moat these days. Talking to people on the business side is not difficult -- it's probably even less of a moat than knowing how to copy/paste javascript.

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