If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you
evalcode.com
evalcode.com
Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another 3 months (New Zealand).
Both the employer and employee know this. So the employee is either foolish or risky enough for asking and gets turned down, or they do actually leave and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.
End of story.
It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.
I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around.
If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.
If someone is claiming to be paid below-market but the company can hire their replacement, then they're not being truthful.
Will you be able to find someone in this economy? Sure
Could you fill the shoes? Much harder. Especially in the age of bootcamps, AI to complete exercises, and what have you where people went into IT for the money and not for the love of the craft, tinkering and learning.
So this is not an oxymoron: you can have 200 applicants and not a single good one to replace someone with them.
My current manager has been with the company for almost 20 years. He doesn't feel the need to leave because his stock options have made him a multimillionaire. The company doesn't care about him or me, but we're both happy to stay because we don't need them to. We just need them to pay us.
You could be an AI infra genius, but if you're in a cookie-cutter consultancy role, that's the salary you're getting.
It’s a lemon market with a power play dynamic, one of the main reasons I’m self employed.
Or they lobby the government for slaves
Market rate for developers has either stagnated generally or depending on the role dropped as hundreds of applicants are willing to undercut each other on what constitutes an acceptable pay check.
But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons.
The main reason being that it's illegal in NZ. The employee would have to agree.
Money doesn't cleanly convert into time.
Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior because of the lower expectations and risk.
Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.
Hiring is the most important function in any company, full stop.
If they aren't good at hiring, well then they shouldn't be running a company. There are no excuses. If HR aren't up to the task, then they should be replaced, and so on up to the level of the CEO, until whatever incompetence has been flushed out. Shareholders have to demand this.
A company not being able to hire is just as ridiculous as a restaurant not being able to serve food.
If they are receiving a flood of applications which is hard to sift through, they are already doing everything wrong. Shareholders have to nuke these kind of people.
That's why some companies will contract with temp agencies for relief.
Yeah but the point of this post is that it makes an assumption that your company doesn't have mid-levels or juniors.
Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.
In SW this is perhaps the easiest domain to counterpunch. Get young folks learning computer history and understanding how the hardware works down to a register level. We write most software with some mental abstraction of what the hardware is actually doing. That's the crux, I believe, and if we lose widespread hardware understanding then we truly do become lost at sea, practicing the mystic art of non deterministic incantations
Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature.
> Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.
I think I see the problem here.
Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer who can monopolize information and has gained authoritative understanding of the design can be crazy powerful, for better or for worse. If this agent optimizes for good salary, lowish effort and high stability... yes I can imagine a senior engineer who fits the name in rate of technical output, not only pecking order order.
The senior engineers, who built the main product that pays the bills have all been there for 25+ years. They held shares in the company back when it was worthless, and now they are all very wealthy. At this point, they literally show up to work just for fun and they aren’t shy about making this known.
The result is that the company has massive insurance policies on these guys in case they die. They also call the shots; they have outsized influence over a range of functions they know absolutely nothing about, ranging from HR to finance to security.
1. Declare AI "the future" and mandate its use by all employees.
2. Hire college grads who have no idea how to code without AI.
3. Start PIPing problem seniors for not being "AI-first" enough. Great way to mask the ageism you are doubtless committing.
2. Yes, if you only have few people who know how to use a powerful tool, they might have leverage.
3. The supply-demand mechanism is certainly there, but the time scale is never mentioned. It'll take time to remove the unemployed juniors from the pool (maybe they get sucked up into other jobs.) It'll take time for seniors to realize they have leverage. And, of course, the company must not have rehired junior engineers for other reasons (e.g. because the coding tools become so good that seniors are not needed.)
Any objections about "this thesis isn't true; look around you" needs to take this into account. The argument is not that we're there now, but that there's a mechanism to lead there.
Right... the alternative is to let the senior engineer go, some work gets reshuffled a bit between other senior engineers, and lowest-priority work is delayed until they hire a new senior engineer.
It's not that the company is held hostage by the senior engineer, sheesh.
> you don’t have options. You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.
Huh? A replacement engineer is "probably" even more than 140% of what you're currently paying? Then your company has a whole other problem which is that it is criminally underpaying its engineers.
Nothing about this post makes any sense. It's not how companies, employees, or the labor market work.
And the AI that is making it easier for engineers to handle so much more engineering, also makes it easier for a new engineer to take over. They literally just sit down and prompt the AI to start explaining how the current system is set up.
It's just about how you assign work, rotate what people work on, code reviews are a part of it, etc.
None of this has anything to do with AI. If anything, the way that best practices around AI involve lots of design documents, tests, markdown, etc. can actually make it much easier for a new employee to continue where a previous employee left off.
In all seriousness even though deep down I know there’s no replacement for experience, I’ve seen a bunch of new people get impressively far with just hacking stuff together. And in the end if you’re making money with that for a long time, isn’t that all that matters to the companies?
It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value.
The entitlement is baked deep into the mindset that there are people who work and people who profit.
They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more.
That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre.
Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.
So the mistakes being made here are:
1. You think you're irreplaceable. You're not. "But--". "--Nope";
2. You think it's more expensive to replace you. Possibly but irrelvant. You see, if they give you a 40% raise, there now might be 10 or 100 other people who will demand a 40% raise. It's cheaper overall not to give you that raise.
This comes up all the time when landlords lose good tenants by raising rents $100-200/month. Tenants will rightly point out that they'll lose more with the vacancy period than they'll get from $100-200/month. Also irrelevant. The landlord will often have 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units. They give a $200 increase to all of them and not all of them are moving. The increased income from those who don't will exceed the losses from those who move.
Plus, the $200/month extra increases the property value. Someone may lend against that increased value to buy even more units;
3. Ultimately any enterprise can only increase profits by raising prices or lowering costs, particularly wages. Suppressing wages becomes the entire business of the company. That's what permanent layoffs culture is for (to get more unpaid work on those that remain and to stop them asking for raises). That's what AI is for. Supressing wages is THE product for AI.
Remember there's a fundamental imbalance here. If a company loses a particular employee, most likely they either won't notice (at least for awhile) or they'll simply be temporarily inconvenienced.
What happens if you don't have a job? You might lose your house, your car, your health insurance, your childrens' school and so on.
The stakes for you are so much higher so in any difficult hiring market, you will be squeezed.
https://www.legalandgeneral.com/insurance/business-protectio...
I don't know if you simply haven't worked with people who are unreplaceable or what, but I assure you with genuine confidence that there are people who cannot be replaced without massive disruption and undesirable risk.
Likewise, if people on your team get better at their jobs and you don't want them to leave, you also have to pay them more.
You don't pay 2x untill you are forced to (eg plumber is the only game on town) not because you are so enlightened.
My enlightenment comes from talking to a bunch of plumbers and hearing what they're gonna charge. That's the market rate.
If I hire an employee and they get good at their job and someone else offers them a 40% raise, they'll probably leave. That's a lot of money.
Some companies care about retention, most don't really.
Large companies have made it abundantly clear that they are sociopathic entities that consider nothing but profit. They will put on a mask and smile and do the absolute minimum to appear to care about you and retain valuable employees but it's all a show.
It is within the best interests of individual engineers to do the same.
I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG.
The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases.
So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.
Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app?
One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.
The remainder of the problems are caused by overly complex deployment/hosting setups. Compiling a binary from source looks like a breeze by comparison.
...and the company says "fine, we'll replace you with AI / wanted a layoff anyway".