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Replacing senior engineers with juniors isn't sustainable though and their software quality is going to get a lot worse. Probably sooner than they think.
by eikenberry 5y ago
Replacing senior engineers with juniors isn't sustainable though and their software quality is going to get a lot worse. Probably sooner than they think.
- munificent 5y agoI mean... sustainably replacing senior people with junior people is the predominant arc of life throughout all human history. People retire or die. You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.
- ehnto 5y agoIt's not just about experience as an individual though, Google has hordes of arcane institutional knowledge about it's own platforms to maintain, like any large organization. Even if they were replacing everyone with senior devs and not juniors, you'd still be losing little bits of that each time someone left. You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.