That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.
Parent comment is really saying to find a way to put a value on institutional knowledge.
If a job/task only requires entry level skills, why are senior employees doing them?
I don't think I can count how many times I've seen a really poorly designed solution causing real pain, and everyone even knows it's bad, but it will never change until X leaves the org, which they have no intent of doing until they're rolling out on a stretcher. Usually X has been there a long time and knows everyone - often they've created enough messes that only they understand to avoid getting laid off. Heck, if the messes are big enough, they can even look like an above average performer to people who aren't overly familiar - generally never top of the stack though, as that might get them asked to take on more work.
I can’t agree with you more. Having a combination of individuals with historical knowledge and new individuals with fresh perspectives can be so refreshing. We recently hired an external architect on the team. She’s great technically. However, I would argue her greatest contribution is fresh perspectives. She suggests ideas others (include me) hadn’t considered due to past negative experiences with team X or Y. By not being as aware of past histories or projects gone bad, she can encourage us to rethink things.
The luddite attitude is orthogonal. Does it happen? Sure. But I also have the expectation that senior staff should be identifying the New, Better Way all the time. And are well-positioned to measure “better”. It is part of providing engineering leadership. An old bird that isn’t keeping up needs a job performance message.
Person B did an unwise thing and spent the weekend working to fix the consequence.
If the problem was subtle and management didn't immediate corelate the action of Person B with the problem, they are likely to profusely praise Person B's working their asses off to save the company during the weekend.
On the flipside, if the company only contains A kind of people or if A people are too influential, it's likely that you'll stick in a local optimum where people are not incentivized to try out new things that may fail but may also succeed.
But in programming, you deal with systems, you know the undocumented gotchas of the system, and understand the flow of it better than someone who's completely new to it. You know when Chesterton's fence applies and when it doesn't. I often tell startups to promote the juniors instead of replacing them with seniors, because the junior who built the system would be able to modify it better.
Even in sales and product, there's some value to understanding what the customer wants and aligning that to the features or a specific pitch and such.
A reasonably experienced surgeon in one hospital in NYC is likely to be almost exactly as great on day one if he moves to the hospital across town.
All too real. Unfortunately, i do think that relying on such expertise is fraught with danger - because both your bus-factor is 1, and it makes it hard to bring up new people.
In practise, this is hard to avoid, but i think a real senior developer should know to document the undocumented, and to communicate (using various mediums) to ensure that nobody needs tribal knowledge to work on a system.
You either don’t know what a doctor does or I don’t understand the point you were trying to drive. Doctors spend decades refining their ability to recognize all kinds of issues that have vastly different conditional probabilities of occurring. Internalizing that is the entire value of a doctor over webmd.
Being a doctor isn’t as simple as absorbing a mechanic’s guide to the human body and just doing the same procedures over and over.
A hiring a senior engineer with 15 years experience, but not at your company, might not compare as favorably to an intermediate engineer with 8 years total experience, but 3 years at your company.
Promoting someone with tenure just because of their domain knowledge is an extremely good way to hit the Peter Principle. You can get people who know the system very well but don't know how to take a step back and look around and evaluate the broader context vs just plugging along the same way as yesterday. Especially if you've never hired someone with those skills to teach them. You also run into bus-factor issues and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul limitations around "this person's domain knowledge would be useful for this new project, but we've never ramped someone up to take over what they're doing now."
Then there are the people who manage to get tenure without actually absorbing too much of that domain knowledge... so you need to be able to evaluate that, plus skills/aptitude/potential, not just years-in-seat, when deciding who to promote, when to hire, etc.
People quoting the "Peter Principle" usually ignore that it is normal to promote beyond current skill level, since it is common to learn a position when in that position.
The Peter Principle is that eventually an employee hits a roadblock where they are failing to learn the new position. That failure is usually attributed to the person, but I would guess the root cause is usually a lack of training ability within the organisation (not commonly recognised as the problem).
I am not a manager, but I see these stereotypical misconceptions all the time... I'm not accusing you of ignorance at all: I'm just pointing out you could be clearer to help us all!
That being said, when somebody finds that fair system sustainably in place at a company, let me know. Fair and accurate measurement of an employees performance, free from bias and favoritism ... I'm just not sure that's how people work.
It seems to be the case that effective and competent leadership is the exception. Even in the military, where enormous amounts of money are spent on attracting, training and retaining leadership; they're simply aren't very many that are very effective. Mediocre leaders get promoted and that's just what everyone else gets to deal with. Other examples include professional sports, academia and politics. The tech industry is hardly an exception here.
Not always, but still I would assume that people with complex tasks generally become more experienced and accumulate specific knowledge over time that makes them better at what they do. Therefore, it should be the default for employees to get a raise every now and then, unless there are clear signs that someone is not performing and the employer is not interested in keeping the person.
In my own very limited experience of mid-size companies, it seems like senior leadership is first on the chopping block when dissatisfaction becomes real. However, the expected value of those positions is much larger due to compensation (i.e. $2e6 x 1 year = $2e5 x 10 years, better assuming execs can find jobs within a few years)
After talking to a lot of managers it really seems that a lot of them are deeply skeptical of the people they themselves have hired.