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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment.

I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.

Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

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> I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.

I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.

And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do the work of two juniors without the communication overhead + do all of the project management, dealing with stakeholders, etc.

But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.

And you can actually hand things off to them: this problem is now your problem. With AIs you’re herding cats

How is that true? As an architect when I was working at product companies, the director/CxO wasn’t going to call the junior developer to the carpet for not getting a task done or even the mid level ticket taker. Hell they don’t even know what the individual tasks are. I’m going to be the one ultimately responsible either way for project success.

Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the Professional Services division (lower title/lot more money), I was the one who was responsible for my “workstream” on larger projects. I couldn’t say “that’s not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just got out of the internal boot camp for new grads”.

Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position in consulting, if a project I’m leading goes sideways, I can’t tell the customer that it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads can’t tell me, it’s the fault of the more junior consultants who work under them. They will never talk to the client. The people under the workstream leads may not even speak English.

And that’s not meant to be an insult. The workstream leads have to he able to speak passable English and they can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level manager don’t control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your manager doesn’t control your promotion and everyone knows it’s better to “boomerang” because you will get paid less being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired as an L5.

Then you shouldn't say "A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment" but "my company decided not to invest in people".

That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.

You’re mencing words for no reason. Companies don’t care about “people”. They care about allocating capital where they see the highest return. Investing in a junior developer who will do negative work instead of a mid level developer who will do positive work once they learn the business and processes is a better investment.

You’re niavely making a moral argument as if anything about corporate America is moral.

Can you make an argument based on numbers? Every single argument I make to leadership has to have a business case

It's not a moral argument, it's about having a short term vision or a long term vision. Most US companies typically just have a short term vision, but that's not the case of all companies.

Japanese companies for example usually care more about long term. This is why US car makers like GM fire workers when business goes down, then need to rehire and potentially re-train workers. Toyota on the other hand doesn't fire workers, instead use their time for training when the business goes down. Guess which company is struggling and which one is the world leader?

So to get back to your leadership: if they only care about the next quarter, then sure no number will convince them. The company might be dead in a few years but they don't care.

Its not about treating them well. The environment and culture isnt the problem. Its that tech companies have decided that they dont like giving appropriate raises to current employees. They are somehow fine with paying the same or more money to bring in an equally qualified external hire. But not with retaining people. Idk why, maybe some stupid MBA rule, mayne theres some good reason behind it

It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.

I've hired that guy and he was a ticket grinder, well-respected by the team.

This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right?

Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.

I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acquisition.

I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)

TBF those RSUs come in handy on cold winter nights when you need tinder.

Well I was 46 years old and married at the time (still married). It helped when I could tell my wife she could stop working and getting up early and I was working remotely. It made those late nights and early morning much more enjoyable.

“Whoever said money can’t solve your problems Must not have had enough money to solve them”

(Partially joking, I make the same post BigTech as a “staff consultant” as an L5 I did mentor as an intern and when they first came back as an L4. Nothing eye popping. But decent)

Sweet summer child. I was once opinionated and driven as you are now. I remember when I got out of college, I also thought like that of the mediocre clock punchers.

Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo and whatnot run with their grandiose vision.

I only want to be left alone.

We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.

Funny enough, the more I got into this mindset, I slept better, made more money, and got more autonomy.

Once directors and CxOs know that you are completely aligned with the business goals and ignore everything else that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”, they trust your judgement and basically leave you alone.

The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspective.

Who would better be able to see those blind spots - a junior developer with no experience or a mid level or senior developer coming in with a fresh set of eyes?

A junior, they have no baggage. Most software is unbelievably bad - almost all those seniors are come from products and companies that are horribly mismanaged, just in different ways. Or, maybe, the same way.

Every developer from the beginning of time thinks that when they come into a new company that everyone who came before them were idiots. Eventually we mature beyond that.

I worked for two companies as a lead and the first thing I did to make things better is - nothing. I asked questions and understand the why.

But what company have you worked for that you only have to understand code? There is code, underlying architecture, dependencies between teams, database schemas and the politics?

I didn't say this company is good and the ones before were idiots - they're all idiots.

I also never said anything about only understanding code. I explicitly mentioned politics. But understanding your particular companies politics isn't necessarily helpful, probably because the politics are shit. So, if you go from one toxic company to another company, you might make it more toxic.

Fresh eyes are always better equipped to ask “Why” to poke at (no longer necessary) Cheshire Fences. Their ignorance (by virtue of being new) gives them cover to question things. This doesn’t necessarily mean inexperienced people, but that does give even more cover to ask the very necessary “why” and get answers, and excuses their lack of familiarity to intuit the situation.

Junior people also tend to have the humility to know they’re inexperienced and lacking insight, so they tend to be more willing to “follow” the senior employees rather than attempt to leave their mark as a leader. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” and all that jazz.

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

It’s telling that OP worked at Amazon because this pretty much sums up the culture there - new grads churning through and burning out in two years while a few seniors stick around and perpetuate the cycle.

I was 46 when I was hired and it was my 8th job out of college. I was far from a naive college grad. I went in with a purpose - keep my head down for 4 years through my initial four year package, put it on my resume, build a network and leave for a smaller consulting shop.

In fact the only reason I got my job there was because a recruiter reached out to me about an SDE job on the retail side. There was no way in hell that I was going to sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta (at the time), uproot my life after Covid and work for Amazon. I knew what I would be getting into.

She then told me about a “permanently remote”,”field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I was like sure why not?

So I should become a director or CxO of a company (because line level managers are powerless to do anything) so I can make those types of decisions?

Not that I’m a line level manager - I’m just a high level IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line level manager

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion.

Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.

- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).

- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.

>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

That's how companies fail.

It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade.

> The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion”

> That's how companies fail.

The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company.

BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program.

In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass.

After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.

>This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade.

That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").

Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Nope, it doesn’t count temps at all. This is easily Googleable.

That counts people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").

Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Again do you have any actual evidence? Citations?

Do you have actual evidence it excludes them?

You're making the stronger claim.

Experience says most absolutely don't jump ship every 2-3 years in the kind of companies I mentioned. Now, if you think companies are playing a rotating musical chairs game and are majority new people every 5 years, ...

Well your anecdotal experience means no more than mine across 10 companies - including startups, small to medium size “lifestyle companies” and two at the time I worked there F10 companies - GE and Amazon.

I can’t go to management - who when I was working as a tech lead pre 2020 - were CTOs, Directors, founders and at times having to talk to the PE owners without solid data.

If the median tenure is 3 years and the software business still is very profitable then people must be net useful within that 3 years. A lot of people also just don’t want to job hop much and honestly the interview culture keeps me from hopping more. I do still fall in the 3 years per hop but I’ve always had a good reason to- ie. layoffs, company going in a worse position than when I started, shit management at various levels, forever compounding responsibility…

Completely misses the point of training someone

So exactly what is the point for a profit seeking company to train someone except thsr you expect them to bring you more business value than they cost during their tenure?

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Until there are no more "seniors"...

More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.

Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs.

That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+.

For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries

Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K?

[1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.

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