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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.

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If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management.

In the 2000s it was seen as very fashionable to job hop frequently, but it was a biased impression that was assumed to be nationwide while it was only really common in SV with the hugely lucrative signing contracts folks like Google, Meta et. all were handing out.

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

In other sectors, juniors are paid a subsistence wage for a few years, so they are still profitable for the company during training. A plumber still needs a cheap pair of arms to move around a bathtub.

There is a wide gap between an intermediate dev and a senior dev - and a senior dev that's spent years learning your codebase and problem area has a lot of tools ready to go that a newly hired dev won't even if they are quite proficient.

I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money.

Again, the company has the control to avoid this.

It might be under compensating for the market at large, but the market has companies where the revenue per employee is orders of magnitude larger than other companies.

I've worked at small companies that had revenue per employee of under $150,000.

The NYT has a revenue per employee of $470k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+revenue+... ) ... and a profit per employee of $50k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+profit+p... ).

https://www.levels.fyi/jobs/company/the-new-york-times-compa...

If an employee there got an offer in Big Tech, they're going to make more.

Until you hit Big Tech or companies trying to compete with them for talent, you can always find an employer that will pay more than your current one.

Very few industries have an interview process that's as painful and time-consuming as the software industry. If people are "job-hopping", perhaps it's because they're dramatically undervalued by their employer. I left my first job for a 30% raise, despite really liking my colleagues and leaving behind a bunch of institutional and systems knowledge and starting with a blank slate.

> The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay).

Critically: While this is the common perception, it is generally un-true.

Just look at how often you get it as reply when you tell people complaining about how it's "impossible to find staff" to hire juniors.

Even in the situations where it is true, the effect of hiring seniors and refusing to hire juniors (thus pushing them into other fields) creates the shortage of seniors that makes it un-true again.

There's just a trend of employers having hard numbers on their staffing expenses, but barely if at all accounting for hiring costs and opportunity costs.

Many simply get it in their head that a senior costs $X/year, and therefore utterly refuse to pay a junior $X/year when they had to spend a flat amount $Y on training them up. Even when the real cost per hire for the senior is vastly bigger than $Y.

Before the post-covid/AI layoffs, tech firms throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars and years chasing seniors instead of just training up a junior was a common thing. So much so that it's a notable contributor to the overworking and burnout problems.

And it's still everywhere in the blue-collar world.

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