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What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give t

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  Until there are no more "seniors"...
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs. That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+. For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K? [1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.
addaon 8mo ago
> I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do the work of two juniors without the communication overhead + do all of the project management, dealing with stakeholders, etc. But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.
  - coffeebeqn 8mo ago
    And you can actually hand things off to them: this problem is now your problem. With AIs you’re herding cats
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      How is that true? As an architect when I was working at product companies, the director/CxO wasn’t going to call the junior developer to the carpet for not getting a task done or even the mid level ticket taker. Hell they don’t even know what the individual tasks are. I’m going to be the one ultimately responsible either way for project success. Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the Professional Services division (lower title/lot more money), I was the one who was responsible for my “workstream” on larger projects. I couldn’t say “that’s not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just got out of the internal boot camp for new grads”. Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position in consulting, if a project I’m leading goes sideways, I can’t tell the customer that it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads can’t tell me, it’s the fault of the more junior consultants who work under them. They will never talk to the client. The people under the workstream leads may not even speak English. And that’s not meant to be an insult. The workstream leads have to he able to speak passable English and they can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.
eloisant 8mo ago
Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level manager don’t control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your manager doesn’t control your promotion and everyone knows it’s better to “boomerang” because you will get paid less being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired as an L5.
  - eloisant 8mo ago
    Then you shouldn't say "A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment" but "my company decided not to invest in people". That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      You’re mencing words for no reason. Companies don’t care about “people”. They care about allocating capital where they see the highest return. Investing in a junior developer who will do negative work instead of a mid level developer who will do positive work once they learn the business and processes is a better investment. You’re niavely making a moral argument as if anything about corporate America is moral. Can you make an argument based on numbers? Every single argument I make to leadership has to have a business case
      - eloisant 8mo ago
        It's not a moral argument, it's about having a short term vision or a long term vision. Most US companies typically just have a short term vision, but that's not the case of all companies. Japanese companies for example usually care more about long term. This is why US car makers like GM fire workers when business goes down, then need to rehire and potentially re-train workers. Toyota on the other hand doesn't fire workers, instead use their time for training when the business goes down. Guess which company is struggling and which one is the world leader? So to get back to your leadership: if they only care about the next quarter, then sure no number will convince them. The company might be dead in a few years but they don't care.
estimator7292 8mo ago
This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right? Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acquisition. I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)
  - polynomial 8mo ago
    TBF those RSUs come in handy on cold winter nights when you need tinder.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      Well I was 46 years old and married at the time (still married). It helped when I could tell my wife she could stop working and getting up early and I was working remotely. It made those late nights and early morning much more enjoyable. “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems Must not have had enough money to solve them” (Partially joking, I make the same post BigTech as a “staff consultant” as an L5 I did mentor as an intern and when they first came back as an L4. Nothing eye popping. But decent)
- xtracto 8mo ago
  Sweet summer child. I was once opinionated and driven as you are now. I remember when I got out of college, I also thought like that of the mediocre clock punchers. Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo and whatnot run with their grandiose vision. I only want to be left alone. We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.
coldtea 8mo ago
>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors. - Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while). - The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. - In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era. >Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. That's how companies fail. It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade. > The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion” > That's how companies fail. The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company. BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program. In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass. After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.
hackable_sand 8mo ago
Completely misses the point of training someone
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  So exactly what is the point for a profit seeking company to train someone except thsr you expect them to bring you more business value than they cost during their tenure?
dyauspitr 8mo ago
It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.
- polynomial 8mo ago
  I've hired that guy and he was a ticket grinder, well-respected by the team.
samrus 8mo ago
> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop
- wonnage 8mo ago
  It’s telling that OP worked at Amazon because this pretty much sums up the culture there - new grads churning through and burning out in two years while a few seniors stick around and perpetuate the cycle.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    I was 46 when I was hired and it was my 8th job out of college. I was far from a naive college grad. I went in with a purpose - keep my head down for 4 years through my initial four year package, put it on my resume, build a network and leave for a smaller consulting shop. In fact the only reason I got my job there was because a recruiter reached out to me about an SDE job on the retail side. There was no way in hell that I was going to sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta (at the time), uproot my life after Covid and work for Amazon. I knew what I would be getting into. She then told me about a “permanently remote”,”field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I was like sure why not?
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  So I should become a director or CxO of a company (because line level managers are powerless to do anything) so I can make those types of decisions? Not that I’m a line level manager - I’m just a high level IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line level manager
array_key_first 8mo ago
The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspective.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Who would better be able to see those blind spots - a junior developer with no experience or a mid level or senior developer coming in with a fresh set of eyes?
  - array_key_first 8mo ago
    A junior, they have no baggage. Most software is unbelievably bad - almost all those seniors are come from products and companies that are horribly mismanaged, just in different ways. Or, maybe, the same way.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      Every developer from the beginning of time thinks that when they come into a new company that everyone who came before them were idiots. Eventually we mature beyond that. I worked for two companies as a lead and the first thing I did to make things better is - nothing. I asked questions and understand the why. But what company have you worked for that you only have to understand code? There is code, underlying architecture, dependencies between teams, database schemas and the politics?
      - array_key_first 8mo ago
        I didn't say this company is good and the ones before were idiots - they're all idiots. I also never said anything about only understanding code. I explicitly mentioned politics. But understanding your particular companies politics isn't necessarily helpful, probably because the politics are shit. So, if you go from one toxic company to another company, you might make it more toxic.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

skeledrew 8mo ago
Until there are no more "seniors"...
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs. That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+. For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K? [1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.

addaon 8mo ago

> I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do the work of two juniors without the communication overhead + do all of the project management, dealing with stakeholders, etc. But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.
- coffeebeqn 8mo ago
  And you can actually hand things off to them: this problem is now your problem. With AIs you’re herding cats
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    How is that true? As an architect when I was working at product companies, the director/CxO wasn’t going to call the junior developer to the carpet for not getting a task done or even the mid level ticket taker. Hell they don’t even know what the individual tasks are. I’m going to be the one ultimately responsible either way for project success. Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the Professional Services division (lower title/lot more money), I was the one who was responsible for my “workstream” on larger projects. I couldn’t say “that’s not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just got out of the internal boot camp for new grads”. Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position in consulting, if a project I’m leading goes sideways, I can’t tell the customer that it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads can’t tell me, it’s the fault of the more junior consultants who work under them. They will never talk to the client. The people under the workstream leads may not even speak English. And that’s not meant to be an insult. The workstream leads have to he able to speak passable English and they can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.

eloisant 8mo ago

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level manager don’t control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your manager doesn’t control your promotion and everyone knows it’s better to “boomerang” because you will get paid less being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired as an L5.
- eloisant 8mo ago
  Then you shouldn't say "A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment" but "my company decided not to invest in people". That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    You’re mencing words for no reason. Companies don’t care about “people”. They care about allocating capital where they see the highest return. Investing in a junior developer who will do negative work instead of a mid level developer who will do positive work once they learn the business and processes is a better investment. You’re niavely making a moral argument as if anything about corporate America is moral. Can you make an argument based on numbers? Every single argument I make to leadership has to have a business case
    - eloisant 8mo ago
      It's not a moral argument, it's about having a short term vision or a long term vision. Most US companies typically just have a short term vision, but that's not the case of all companies. Japanese companies for example usually care more about long term. This is why US car makers like GM fire workers when business goes down, then need to rehire and potentially re-train workers. Toyota on the other hand doesn't fire workers, instead use their time for training when the business goes down. Guess which company is struggling and which one is the world leader? So to get back to your leadership: if they only care about the next quarter, then sure no number will convince them. The company might be dead in a few years but they don't care.

estimator7292 8mo ago

This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right? Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acquisition. I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)
- polynomial 8mo ago
  TBF those RSUs come in handy on cold winter nights when you need tinder.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Well I was 46 years old and married at the time (still married). It helped when I could tell my wife she could stop working and getting up early and I was working remotely. It made those late nights and early morning much more enjoyable. “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems Must not have had enough money to solve them” (Partially joking, I make the same post BigTech as a “staff consultant” as an L5 I did mentor as an intern and when they first came back as an L4. Nothing eye popping. But decent)
xtracto 8mo ago
Sweet summer child. I was once opinionated and driven as you are now. I remember when I got out of college, I also thought like that of the mediocre clock punchers. Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo and whatnot run with their grandiose vision. I only want to be left alone. We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.

coldtea 8mo ago

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors. - Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while). - The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. - In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era. >Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. That's how companies fail. It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade. > The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion” > That's how companies fail. The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company. BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program. In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass. After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.

hackable_sand 8mo ago

Completely misses the point of training someone

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
So exactly what is the point for a profit seeking company to train someone except thsr you expect them to bring you more business value than they cost during their tenure?

dyauspitr 8mo ago

It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.

polynomial 8mo ago
I've hired that guy and he was a ticket grinder, well-respected by the team.

samrus 8mo ago

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

wonnage 8mo ago
It’s telling that OP worked at Amazon because this pretty much sums up the culture there - new grads churning through and burning out in two years while a few seniors stick around and perpetuate the cycle.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  I was 46 when I was hired and it was my 8th job out of college. I was far from a naive college grad. I went in with a purpose - keep my head down for 4 years through my initial four year package, put it on my resume, build a network and leave for a smaller consulting shop. In fact the only reason I got my job there was because a recruiter reached out to me about an SDE job on the retail side. There was no way in hell that I was going to sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta (at the time), uproot my life after Covid and work for Amazon. I knew what I would be getting into. She then told me about a “permanently remote”,”field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I was like sure why not?
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
So I should become a director or CxO of a company (because line level managers are powerless to do anything) so I can make those types of decisions? Not that I’m a line level manager - I’m just a high level IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line level manager

array_key_first 8mo ago

The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspective.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
Who would better be able to see those blind spots - a junior developer with no experience or a mid level or senior developer coming in with a fresh set of eyes?
- array_key_first 8mo ago
  A junior, they have no baggage. Most software is unbelievably bad - almost all those seniors are come from products and companies that are horribly mismanaged, just in different ways. Or, maybe, the same way.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Every developer from the beginning of time thinks that when they come into a new company that everyone who came before them were idiots. Eventually we mature beyond that. I worked for two companies as a lead and the first thing I did to make things better is - nothing. I asked questions and understand the why. But what company have you worked for that you only have to understand code? There is code, underlying architecture, dependencies between teams, database schemas and the politics?
    - array_key_first 8mo ago
      I didn't say this company is good and the ones before were idiots - they're all idiots. I also never said anything about only understanding code. I explicitly mentioned politics. But understanding your particular companies politics isn't necessarily helpful, probably because the politics are shit. So, if you go from one toxic company to another company, you might make it more toxic.