Comment by coldtea

10 hours ago

>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.

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coldtea

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raw_anon_1111  10 hours ago

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.

  • coffeebeqn  7 hours ago

    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…

  • coldtea  8 hours ago

    >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.