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So, say you hire a junior developer and spend a year training them to the next level of seniority, at significant training / opportunity cost expense. They now
by SatvikBeri 9y ago
So, say you hire a junior developer and spend a year training them to the next level of seniority, at significant training / opportunity cost expense.
They now command a much higher market rate - you can pay the higher salary and retain them, or not and they'll leave. Either way, the company is out the training cost relative to hiring someone senior from the beginning.
(I say this as someone who hires 90% junior people and trains them. I think there are good reasons to do so, but the commons problem is real.)
- vonmoltke 9y agoYou need to balance the training cost (offset by revenue generated) of growing juniors against the cost of acquiring and onboarding senior hires.
- SatvikBeri 9y agoRight - as of recently, I would claim that the market is distorted in a weird way where hiring senior people is just a better deal for most startups than hiring juniors and training them, even factoring in all the associated costs, because a weird effect where market rates for senior developers are maybe ~2-3x higher but they are 5-10x more effective. Market rates for senior developers relative to juniors should go up in this scenario, but they haven't really, and I don't understand why. The main selfish economic reason to hire junior developers is if the marginal return of hiring someone sooner swamps the relatively higher total cost, which is why you'll see companies like Google that have huge RoI on engineers hiring many more college grads.
- s73ver_ 9y agoYes. It's called an investment. I don't see it as being that different from companies expecting an employee to be doing the work of the next level for a while before they get the promotion/raise of that level.