1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.
I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.
Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180
Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.
The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.
this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30 years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those problems and work on entirely different set of problems. I cannot compute how AI makes everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, problems I am solving today few people on my team are working on and then same goes down the "pyramid"
Automation always runs into diminishing returns for similar reasons. If 99.99% of a workload is embarrassingly parallel, what remains becomes important once you can throw enough cores at the problem.
You’ll see a guy in a multi million dollar crane lifting multi ton objects and then people using ropes attached to that same load for final positioning etc. What you don’t see is people using ropes to lift bricks 20 stories by hand as the crane lifts multi ton pallets of bricks as automation is taking care of that kind of task.
Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.