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We're building a highly specialized product (GNSS Radiooccultation). Its specialized enough that we have to rely on hiring people with generic skills and then developing the specialized skills to work in the domain. In essence, we are relying on internal on-the-job training to build up our team. Remote work failed for us for the same reasons that remote education has been failing everywhere: 1/4 to 1/2 of the job is adult professional education.

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Makes sense. Seems like we can generalize this to if you're working in a niche area requiring lots of training to bring new hires up to speed then perhaps WFH isn't the best of environments? Going forward maybe your team needs to think through how to best do your onboarding. Maybe you would need to get together for a couple weeks (or have "high touch" time) and then go back to primarily working from home? It's something to think about.

I'm a big fan of hybrid, albeit default remote. But this is one example as to why. For most groups, most of the time remote is fine. There will be circumstances where there's no substitute for in person communication. You cite a great example.

For your situation I would imagine in a hypothetical example where your team composition stays steady for a long period of time you'd find that you required onsite less often. And in that case I'd advocate that defaulting back to remote is a good thing.

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