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Comment by cauliflower99 | Hacker News Reader

All the people here saying WFH employees are happier than those who aren't are completely incorrect in the long term. This claim does not account for a very large group of employees: The junior engineer.

A junior learns at a fraction of the pace of a senior and relies on direct 1-1 help, together with learning by observing others. This is quite difficult online and requires a lot of hand-holding which most mid-level / seniors are not willing to do.

So saying that WFH policies should be the norm is no longer an acceptable statement. It sacrifices the longevity of the team and the company if juniors cannot be onboarded quickly.

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Easy, in todays market, there are plenty of experienced developers who are being laid off so you don’t have to hire juniors.

There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.

Salary compression and inversion is real.

Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem

It’s not like sitting in one place makes someone a more “senior” dev in anything but tenure. Juniors who stay at one company tend not to be developers with 10 years of experience at the end, but instead developers with 1 year of experience 10 times.

And that’s good enough for that company. It’s a problem when they get ready to get a new job.

Exactly: all this bullshit about job hopping benefits only low grade employers who want fungible employees. Screw them all: hop away!

Companies generally offload the expensive resources first requiring the cheaper, juniors to step up and take on more responsibilities. This is good of course, but if the junior cannot get support to learn their new responsibilities, they'll just be stressed, we'll get lower quality code and overall the morale goes down.

Junior developers do “negative work” almost by definition. They can’t work independently without guidance. If they can, they are inappropriately leveled and should be at least mid level developers.

> If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors

It's self-correcting: the fewer seniors there are, the more they cost. Eventually hiring a junior becomes the more economical option. The market gets exactly as many seniors as it deserves :)

Not just juniors. I'm a senior engineer (10+ years exp). I recently changed teams, and even with knowing how things work at the company, onboarding has been challenging. It takes a lot more active effort on my end, and the results are still worse than in-person onboarding.

I mean, boo hoo. I taught myself programming by reading docs and stackoverflow while working head down for years at a company that had no other professional developers. 1.5 hours commute each way. I'd 100% have taken a WFH arrangement over that and I'd be just as good.

All i can say to that is well done! But a company that sells software today requires far more mentorship for the junior than figuring it out yourself as a lone developer in a non software company. Take telecoms for example where you cannot even Google the right acronym let alone understand how to use the company's internal programming framework to build an application that won't be deployed for another year. Most juniors drown with such large loads of info in my experience.

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