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.
But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.
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.
That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").
Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.
Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.
You're making the stronger claim.
Experience says most absolutely don't jump ship every 2-3 years in the kind of companies I mentioned. Now, if you think companies are playing a rotating musical chairs game and are majority new people every 5 years, ...
I can’t go to management - who when I was working as a tech lead pre 2020 - were CTOs, Directors, founders and at times having to talk to the PE owners without solid data.
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.
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)
“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)
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.
Once directors and CxOs know that you are completely aligned with the business goals and ignore everything else that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”, they trust your judgement and basically leave you alone.
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
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.
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
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
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?
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?
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.
Junior people also tend to have the humility to know they’re inexperienced and lacking insight, so they tend to be more willing to “follow” the senior employees rather than attempt to leave their mark as a leader. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” and all that jazz.
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.