This is a tough thing to have a useful discussion about in this industry where people can hardly agree on what a "Junior" and "Senior" developer are. I don't a

This is a tough thing to have a useful discussion about in this industry where people can hardly agree on what a "Junior" and "Senior" developer are. I don't agree with the dichotomies that the author lays out here, for example the idea that juniors are generalists and seniors are specialists or the claim that you need juniors on your team in order to have a culture of teaching and cross-training. But I do think that hiring juniors is important to the health of the industry and can be beneficial to many orgs. It seems like everyone wants to hire a senior dev, but nobody wants to train the juniors into seniors. In my experience, all hiring is a gamble. Hire a bad junior and you run the risk of them being dead weight, or worse, they fuck up your codebase and drain time and resources from your more useful devs. Hire a bad senior and they're about as bad, but you sunk a lot more money into their paychecks. Hire a good junior and you get awesome work for a discount, though you'll need to promote them before they learn their worth and move on. Hire a good senior and you'll have someone who can build whatever you need, diagnose any problem, lead a team, teach skills to their coworkers, and so on. Also, it will always depend on your org and your team. Some big companies have new grad programs where they have programs to teach and onboard people so that they can effectively absorb huge cohorts of juniors. They've run the numbers and have determined it's worth the investment. On the other hand, some companies simply don't need juniors at all. Think early stage startup or a lean stable small to mid-sized company; at places like that you can really do everything with 10-20 good seniors.