It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates herded b

It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior devs don't make things worse. And most failures of junior devs (breaking stuff) are considered the responsibility of the senior dev managing them, so the senior dev bears just as much responsibility as before but now with less control and more unpredictability. It is certainly good to have juniors on the team, but managing them should not take the greatest part of your senior devs' time, and your product should not be written exclusively by juniors. Some CEOs deflect accusations of cheapness by claiming they don't want "rockstars/divas," but that's a personality trait, not a skill, and the crappiest of crappy junior devs are certainly capable of embodying rockstar arrogance. Most work is tweaking an existing codebase, and quick fluency in arbitrary code written by strangers is definitely not a junior-level skill. In fact, CS-heavy stuff with little external integration is perfect for fresh graduates, as they did learn it in school.