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This seems to strike a chicken and egg problem. Who will grow the talent? It seems you'll need to hire the mentors for that. And what's the level of growth poss

This seems to strike a chicken and egg problem. Who will grow the talent? It seems you'll need to hire the mentors for that. And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs? As far as I know, most interview processes are designed to hire potential. For example, if you can't learn fundamental algorithms in a reasonable amount of prep time to prepare for the interview, but someone else could... Which talent has the most likely potential? I'd even go and claim that the current interview processes are biased against senior talent. Someone who already knows they are qualified won't be motivated to go and practice fundamental algos that they haven't needed for real work in years. They'll expect their own track record and knowledge to be recognized on it's own. But, the interviews won't care about that. And they might instead hire a junior with more time and motivation on their hand, which decided to spend all evenings for the last two months doing leet code questions. Similarly, many companies seem to favor new grads, which they can quickly brain wash into their existing engineering culture. They think, these new grads really strive, instead of challenging the status quo, they internalize our processes and work hard to deliver, even if we're being unreasonable. Eventually, this creates a lack of perspective in the entire company. Hiring more external senior talent would help get more perspectives, and prevent this silo of opinion that hurts innovation over time.

dfrage 8y ago
> And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs? Senior devs who are good at mentoring also ought to be good at learning new stuff. They'll also be learning some things from the mentees, at least some of them will know stuff they don't know because our field is so vast. Once the mentees catch up? If you've inculcated a learning culture, these new senior devs will be learning new things right along with the old ones.

dfrage 8y ago

> And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs? Senior devs who are good at mentoring also ought to be good at learning new stuff. They'll also be learning some things from the mentees, at least some of them will know stuff they don't know because our field is so vast. Once the mentees catch up? If you've inculcated a learning culture, these new senior devs will be learning new things right along with the old ones.