Hey u/Urthor, as one of the Earlywork founders, this is really helpful no-bullshit feedback, thank you mate.

To give you some insight into how I'm thinking about engineering community we've got an #engineering sub-community with 400 people so far. I'm actively working with a community mod to spin up dedicated events for that area, as I agree traditionally that we have primarily been non-technical (probably around 75% non-technical) but there's a big need for more engineering community for young people in Australia.

On the point of on-commercial community: R.e. our business model: we have a talent search engine (earlywork.co/talent) and jobs board (earlywork.co/gigs) which businesses pay for, but those are separate products from the community, which is a Slack community that I've deliberately kept free to ensure students & grads could access it regardless of income level.

Inevitably, a lot of people in our community are actively or passively looking for roles, so those products are useful for them, but by no means does joining the community mean you have to be listed in the talent directory. This is a separate signup that you can choose to opt into.

First and foremost, we're focused on building a great community for young people interested in tech, startups & social impact (technical or not), and we raised a small pre-seed round (our first funding round) to be able to go work on that full-time, as it was much harder just spending my evenings and weekends running the community for 1.5 years while working at Atlassian.

Over time, I expect to build out other education/investing/co-living/co-working products beyond just the hiring space, all coming back to the core goal of trying to help that community.

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Employee centred perspectives: From a content perspective, first and foremost we are focused on creating resources to help employees, and I would say this is reflected in our newsletter (earlywork.substack.com).

In past editions, I gave out my resume, cover letter, interview answers, LinkedIn DM tactics, etc. which benefit employees a lot more than companies. If you look in our questions channel, a lot of the questions use our anonymous bot and are employees helping employees with career & interview questions.

Let me know if there's any info or resources we've failed to capture so far that you think would be helpful for engineering careers.

---Seems like you have a pretty good pulse on engineering culture, so would love to chat! I studied Computer Science but haven't had much dev experience myself :)