Red Hat to hire less experienced engineers

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697.

The last time I built a team, I hired a spectrum of seniority. I needed the more senior folks to make good judgement calls and mentor the less experienced. I needed the less experienced to apply their coding skills to actually get the product built. I needed the team to be an effective "growth machine" for everyone at every stage of their career, and I wouldn't be able to do that if I couldn't (A) give senior people leadership (read: influence) opportunities and (B) give more junior people the guidance they needed to learn and develop.

I can see how a company, due to prior policies or ebbs and flows of the hiring pipeline could become either bottom-heavy or top-heavy. If you're not deliberate, with time you can easily become top-heavy, and at that point your options for giving more experienced people leadership opportunities have become restricted. When that happens, I can see how a deliberate hiring policy for a period of time might seem like a good way to correct it.

If managed well, it can be good for the existing experienced people because they will have more opportunities to grow their careers through mentorship and giving technical direction. It can be good for the future of the company because less experienced people will bring with them fewer biases and might help introduce good ideas that would otherwise be institutionally rejected.

And in the current market (at least), I'm not seeing any kind of shortage of demand across the industry for experienced tech folks. At least judging by the degree to which I'm being inundated by recruiters for senior tech positions.