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Comment by danjoc | Hacker News Reader

>the rate is anywhere from $190-$300 an hour

Well there's your problem. Valley pricing. You can get Sr Devs much cheaper than that. Then you can afford to train up some juniors.

I don't think that's the real problem though. Companies want you to take the risk/expense of learning a technology that might be obsolete next year. They'll pay you back in salary if you lucked up and mastered the right stack. If you didn't, then you keep eating ramen until you strike gold.

The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

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> The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

I think this is pertinent, when you're already too busy doing things and keeping stuff running, who has the time to handle a run-of-the-mill junior?

The most successful launches I've seen is where a junior comes in and can already contribute _at some level_, this is always due to the extra curricular work they've done outside of their education (if indeed they had any higher level education at all).

The spectrum of jobs out there allows a creative (or lucky, in my case) junior to springboard. Think of 'started out modifying and configuring wordpress themes, ended up writing some custom code and extensions, ended up learning laravel and databases' type of progression. You won't be working in bleeding edge AI or at Google on their self driving cars, but you'll be solving problems for people, and that's a career.

> Well there's your problem. Valley pricing. You can get Sr Devs much cheaper than that.

The article seems to be referring to how much agencies are hiring out their senior developers for. Which, $190-300/hr. does not seem atypical in that scenario, even outside the valley. The developers themselves won't be making anywhere near that much.

Since this company seemingly makes its money by having the senior developers doing billable work for clients, the article suggests that the business doesn't want them spending time helping junior developers and thus not billing (or, perhaps, billing at the junior rate).

>The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

A system where a Jr can easily start fires is a system that's bound to fail. It means whatever you use for production is incredibly fragile and bound to be broken even by a more senior developer making a single mistake.

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