Mentorship and teaching are also valuable skills. Many good senior engineers would love to focus on them if their employer recognized it as valuable.

Yea, um, nothing wrong with mentoring and teaching but when management wants me to turn things out on a dime at the same time. Not happening. That junior is getting MINIMAL possible attention for me to work on what ultimately keeps my job not theirs.

Is that really true? Maybe some, but I don’t know about “many”. I’d imagine when most people start on their dev career, they don’t imagine their dream job to be “teaching,” they imagine it to be coding. I think you’d have a tough time getting responses for a “senior engineer” job ad that says you’ll actually be a full time mentor.

I'm just an anecdote, but if I could earn the same salary teaching and mentoring as I do as a tech lead I'd do it with very little hesitation.

This route exists, it's called training and you can earn even more doing that. Absolutely doable, but it's a long road to get there (salary- and lifestyle wise).

Even then, pair programming with a different person every day sounds awful.

Fair question.

At least in the above scenario, it was Andres doing the work of initially getting someone up to speed and then pairing the coworkers on an appropriate level feature/bug. He'd stop by and check in to see where they were stuck and would genuinely try and solve the problem.

So, it has to be someone who is a great coder for that stack and enjoys teaching.

If it's done right, other members of the team become good teachers as well, so the initial burden of teaching is lightened.

> how do you keep the senior developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?

Pay them well, and give them a regular chunk of (paid) time to work on something that furthers their growth / is intellectually stimulating / whatever.

Pay them a lot.

A certain pay level is necessary, but not sufficient, to keep talented staff.

Well, they probably chose the tech stack so they can either help with the hiring process or the training process.