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Where are young developers less productive than their seniors? People are literally building successful companies on the fact that if you set up an university l

• mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Most of the companies you’re describing fold and fail miserably after just a few years. Only very, very, very, very, very few of them achieve any kind of significant funding or market success. I wonder why?
  • ativzzz 6y ago
    Code quality has nothing to do with the success of the vast majority of businesses
    • jacobsenscott 6y ago
      Business seldom fail for a single reason, but poor code quality can be a major contributor to failure. Do you need to pay 20 programmers rather than 10? Do you have a higher customer turnover rate because they encounter too many bugs and lose trust in the system? Do you lose out on sales because you can't close the feature gaps with your competitors? Are you unable to respond to customer support requests in a timely fashion because there are too many, or fixing the problems is really hard?
      • thinkingkong 6y ago
        Parent said vast majority and they're correct. As a corollary I've seen companies with impeccable code bases fail dramatically.
        • collyw 6y ago
          A company with an impeccable code base? Fake news.
        • mlthoughts2018 6y ago
          You’re missing the point. “Fling spaghetti code at the wall” will produce many failures and a few winners - the winners will not serve as evidence that poor spaghetti code is a perfectly viable business strategy.
          • thinkingkong 6y ago
            On the contrary; thats usually what happens. I'm not saying its _correct_ but the amount of cargo-culting I hear intermediate spaghetti-unicorn engineers repeat means they're actually inferring that it's a repeatable process.
    • UncleMeat 6y ago
      That's why all andreessen horowitz funded companies hire a skeleton crew in bangalore, right? Code quality can't make a business succeed. But sufficiently bad code can cause a business to fail.
    • Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      Screw up in ecommerce and your company ends up the front page on the business sections ASOS for example. I recall fixing a major problem where we could not collect any direct debits for 6-7 months and we put one of the most high profile UK tech journalist's bank account intro the red - that made the Guardian. Neither I or the company secretary ever got a thank you for recovering in todays terms several million pounds.
  • moksly 6y ago
    They don’t fail though, and there is a really good reason why they don’t. When you sell software to non-tech companies, they’re used to failures. We have 1 supplier out of more than 1200, who hasn’t screwed up majorly at one point or the other. In a world where that’s a fact, and people have just sort of learned to live with shitty software and IT that doesn’t always works. The key selling point for any major product is cost, and upfront cost weighs so much more than cost-down-the-line. Especially in management where managers won’t be around 4-8 years later when the contract is up for renewal.
• g051051 6y ago
  > Where are young developers less productive than their seniors? People are literally building successful companies on the fact that if you set up an university like environment, have foosball, tech-interest-talk and pizza nights, then you can hire a bunch of fresh developers who will work a lot of extra and free hours for you because they are young. This myth comes up surprisingly often. I've never met a junior developer that could match my productivity as a senior developer. Not to say they're bad in any way, but I've got literally decades more experience in the tools and technologies they're just learning. Maybe they're willing to work longer hours, but they aren't being nearly as productive in those hours as a senior dev.
  • zeku 6y ago
    I agree with you completely. I'm a mid level right now and I can get 4x more work done than my junior can, and my senior can do 2x more work than me in a day.
  • moksly 6y ago
    I think you’re missing the key component of payment. They cost very little, and, they work extra hours for free. It’s not really a myth. Some of the most successful companies in my region is doing exactly this sort of thing. The quality isn’t as good, and your know-how leaves once they “grow up”, but it’s proving to be a really good business model. Which from a management perspective can be explained as the following: In non tech you buy software and development time, and projects almost always fail to deliver on time or within budget regardless of which company you go with. At the same time, the biggest note on your budget is the upfront cost. Even if you end up spending more by going with these junior exploitative companies in the long run, it’s still easier to justify picking them when you’re talking up the latter, because they charge 3-40% less an hour. On top of that there are different kinds of productivity. There’s the senior developer who does things right, but non-tech clients don’t give a shit about that, they just want something that works most of the time. Which again is more expensive in the long run, but nobody in management is around for long enough to realise, and or, learn from past experiences based on real data. No, in management you learn with how much praise your project gets, and it doesn’t really have to be sound technically to get that.
• mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  What does it mean to "make haste slowly"?
  • nescioquid 6y ago
    Festina lente: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente
  • lovegoblin 6y ago
    Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
• lhorie 6y ago
  > Where are young developers less productive than their seniors? This is not supposed to be taken as something to be defensive about. Some subset of juniors don't have a clue about the things they don't have a clue and learn as they go, making mistakes along the way that they then need to maintain. Some juniors also compensate by working long hours. But the thing is that these things are also true for some seniors, just as the opposite observations are true of both some juniors and some seniors. The point is precisely that things are more equal than they are different when you are looking at age demographics and you actually consider that any demographic group has a wide spread in terms of competence, willingness to put long hours, and even experience.
• nilkn 6y ago
  Most top companies have a mixture of junior and experienced talent. FAANG companies these days are paying $600k+ for Staff+ engineers, so clearly they don't think that relying solely on campus hiring is a viable strategy. Having a healthy mixture is key to building a really strong engineering team. You need an efficient pipeline to ingest junior engineers and staff low-complexity projects, but you also need a solid set of senior and staff engineers to guide projects, drive cross-team coordination, staff high-complexity projects, and (very important!) mentor and grow your junior engineers. Without this, your junior talent will remain junior -- you'll end up with a large group of folks with 1 year of experience repeated N times.
• astrobe_ 6y ago
  > then you can hire a bunch of fresh developers who will work a lot of extra and free hours for you because they are young We don't have the same definition of "productive". Extra free hours is not "productive", it's "profitable". More productive means do more in less time.
  • moksly 6y ago
    No, productive means profitable. It’s the only thing that counts.
    • astrobe_ 6y ago
      Be careful with jokes on HN.