Comment by spyhi
2 years ago
A senior engineer can work through a hard problem assigned to a junior engineer, resulting in a well-implemented hard feature and a less junior engineer. Just because a junior engineer is working on it doesn’t mean by default it’s an easy problem—how are you going to grow your engineers otherwise?
Some firms simply hire nothing but Seniors. You trained up a Junior-Mid-Senior? Cool, well offer him 20k more and call it a day.
> Some firms simply hire nothing but Seniors
The firms that claim to do that almost invariably do not hire people with 20 years of experience, they hire people with 2 years of experience 10 times over. Sometimes that's fine. Usually it's not.
This seems like nothing more than a desire to gatekeep experience? Being employed as a programmer means you're gaining experience...Even if you work at a single company for 20 years, you're not going to get some mythical competence that you could only get by staying in one area. This line of thinking seems like nonsense.
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Agreed, I will almost always take someone with 5 years of experience at a couple of good shops rather than 20 years of experience broken up across 10 different ones.
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This, sadly, needs to change.
The pool for experienced senior level talent won't grow unless _someone_ spends the resources to hire and train juniors.
The incentive being that they can keep the best juniors for themselves and let the others back into the pool for others.