Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

I asked how often does it happen. I can almost guarantee you that the retention rate of developers who feel they're being treated well is much, much higher than otherwise.

What you are recommending is that employers pay for training, and then pay employees exactly the same that they would get for hiring someone with equivalent skills from the market. This leaves employers out by the cost of training from the cost of hiring from the market. So the business is strictly behind where it would have been.

But worse yet, a non-trivial fraction of the time when you train someone for a role that they aren't currently in, you find that by ability or inclination they are not actually suited for that role. Which means that you're now just out the cost of training and may well have also lost the employee. By contrast someone that you hire externally who is already in the role is more likely to be a fit. Furthermore businesses tend to run on lean margins. You're hiring because you need those skills now, not in a year. A lot can change in a year.

Now against this you have to balance the fact that hiring people is expensive, new hires take time to come up to speed, and not all new hires work out. Furthermore a loyal employee with institutional knowledge has value because of that. It isn't a one-sided deal. Companies do train people.

However it is more common for it to be someone that they know already. Such as an internal promotion, or someone who did an internship. Hiring strangers expecting to train them with no particular reason to believe that you will keep them is a losing proposition.

Businesses that consistently pay for losing propositions usually wind up going out of business.

Treat the junior developers like anyone else - someone who wants the best for their career and knowledge base - and provide it for them. Incentivize them to stay. Train them properly and give them resources to succeed. Maintain an internal culture that properly cultivates their talents and gives them mentors to work with and aspire to. Compensate them when they've reached proper thresholds in their usefulness to the team, and provide honest and valuable feedback (positive and negative) as much as you can. Plus avoid the obvious pitfalls: don't abuse them or belittle them for basic questions or silly mistakes. Don't throw them into the deep end with little to no chance of success. Don't talk down to them or treat them as a substandard part of the team. Don't start firing the juniors the minute the workload starts winding down. These are all signs of disrespect for your own workforce and everyone can see obvious red flags, even juniors.

Given the griping about tech interviews these days, does anyone really think that people actually like job hopping? They do it either to avoid poisonous situations, or out of obvious and necessary self interest, one that can be provided by a company willing to treat their junior hires with respect. There's no reason hiring a junior cannot be a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Data that you can find in Software Estimation: Demystifying The Black Art quantifies this. The overall productivity of a team increases until it has 5-8 people. Then it goes down. A team of 12 actually accomplishes LESS per month than it would if you fired half the people. However once you get to 20-25 people, productivity is back. And then increases fairly close to linearly.

Going from 5-8 people all the way to 20+ with no increase in throughput is really, really painful. And those aren't cheap people. This provides companies with a huge incentive to figure out how to get a small team to be as productive as possible. And you don't get the most out of a small team by filling it up with junior to mid-level devs.

This is in the context of businesses complaining about a shortage of developers. If every mid or senior level position was getting filled without much grief or effort, then there wouldn't be any issue. But in a situation where the business can't seem to find anyone that fits the bill, the obvious solution is to look at the talent they CAN train, instead of hoping the exact right candidate walks through the door.

Furthermore, in any reasonable organization where things like positive/negative code review, respectful seniors, mentorship, and a general respect of all developers are part of the company culture, the cost of training a junior developer to be useful to the project is largely absorbed. Of course, a company where everyone is isolated and heads-down will consider training to be a huge burden, because it's completely orthogonal to their workflow.

> Businesses that consistently pay for losing propositions usually wind up going out of business.

Businesses that focus on the short term "we need this now, get the butt in the seat" aren't thinking about the workforce as people, which is just as insidious.