Hacker News Reader

Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

What do you do when your seniors move on or retire?

Also, even seniors are usually more than happy to outsource work they've already done a million times, but that's still new to the junior ("build the Terraform to stand up this cluster" etc).

View on HN

People only average a few years in a job these days. The juniors are most likely to end up as seniors somewhere else. So hiring juniors who provide negative value at the start is mostly benefiting the industry as a whole at your own personal loss. Which makes it a pretty easy thing to cut.

I know in other industries they have a kind of lock in where they provide free training under the condition that you work at the same company for a number of years. Which sounds bad but I don't see many alternatives.

But you too can hire seniors in the future who were juniors trained "somewhere else". This is the kind of shortsighted selfishness that's ruining most things.

Obviously it's selfishness, but it's a prisoners dilemma where the you just lose if you are the only one training the juniors who then move on to the competitors later.

So motivate them to not move on to competitors. I don't think companies should cynically take it as given that people only last N years, and will leave for greener pastures once they're trained. They're leaving for a reason, so address that reason.

I believe the reason is often not a company problem, it's a variety problem that nothing can solve.

It's a totally unavoidable problem with our industry.

People get bored working on one domain, one product and one codebase.

And most software shops have one domain, one product and one codebase.

I have quit a dev job exactly one time, when offered a salary the first one wouldn't meet (the HR person straight up told me she didn't understand why they would pay me $80k in the exit interview, this was like 6 years ago). Since the second company pays me well (with benefits), gives me yearly raises, and gives out generous performance based bonuses, I haven't looked for another job since then. And yes, job #2 is often boring.

It's pay. It's always been pay.

> It's a totally unavoidable problem with our industry.

It's the pay.

> People get bored working on one domain, one product and one codebase.

Yeah bullshit. It's the pay.

Then operate as a manager, leader or company that people don't want to quit.

If people are happy, paid well, with regular cost-of-living raises at minimum, with upward mobility, helpful and useful managers and interesting problems (doesn't have to be an interesting domain. The problems themselves just need a bit to chew on) and the latitude to solve them and grow

They're not as likely to leave.

Don't vesting schedules accomplish the same thing?

As a CS undergrad in my final year of study, a 5-year contract with guarantees with regards to employment, benefits, promotion etc. would appear to me and think would also appeal to many of my peers.

Give them decent pay increases and I'll guarantee you they won't leave.

People can leave for a lot of other reasons than money. You can't control or predict that.

Don't be pedantic, you know that for most people, it is about the money, especially when you're a junior living in HCOL area.

> So hiring juniors who provide negative value at the start is mostly benefiting the industry as a whole at your own personal loss. Which makes it a pretty easy thing to cut.

That's true, but why are you qualifying this with "who provide negative value at the start" in the first place? What if you hire juniors who provide positive value at the start instead?

I mean I agree with hiring juniors. I try to push for it as it’s how I got into this industry but it’s a bit of a prisoners dilemma right? It’s best for everyone if we all hired and trained up juniors but one could also defect and only hire seniors.

Besides most companies won’t last long enough to worry about senior talent drying up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com