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If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

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Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#51

Post by jjmarr »

SR2Z wrote: post #32
lukeify wrote: post #13

> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like. Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another…

> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around.

If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.

If someone is claiming to be paid below-market but the company can hire their replacement, then they're not being truthful.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#52

Post by Negitivefrags »

lukeify wrote: post #37
SR2Z wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

This is pretty much what's occurring in New Zealand right now, yes. 2020–2023 had pretty much zero international movement due to closed borders with COVID-19, with a low official cash rate which caused business to be in desperate need of development resource; so salaries were high. Market rate for developers has either stagnated generally or depending on the role dropped as hundreds of applicants are willing to under…

> But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons.

The main reason being that it's illegal in NZ. The employee would have to agree.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#53

Post by peteforde »

jmyeet wrote: post #36
peteforde wrote: post #6

If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it. It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value. The entitlement is baked deep into the minds…

The employer and the employee have different goals and metrics for "success". This mismatch comes up all the time whenever "interviewing is broken" threads come up. Many interviewees think the goal is to find the best person for the job. It isn't. It is to find someone suffciently good to do the job for the least money possible. This mean that if you filter out "better" candidates, it's not a failure if the position…

Your assertions are confounded by the existence and necessity for key-person insurance.

https://www.legalandgeneral.com/insurance/business-protectio...

I don't know if you simply haven't worked with people who are unreplaceable or what, but I assure you with genuine confidence that there are people who cannot be replaced without massive disruption and undesirable risk.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#54

Post by doublescoop »

awakeasleep wrote: post #30
throw-the-towel wrote: post #4

> Eventually this turns into a comp conversation. A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,”... ...and the company says "fine, we'll replace you with AI / wanted a layoff anyway".

Whats your background in the industry, where this seems plausible?

As someone with 20 years in the industry, it seems absolutely plausible. Stupid, but entirely within the realm of possibility. The people making these calls have no loyalty to their company; they have loyalty to their own career. And if doing this is something that gives them a win and they can be gone by the time the consequences some around... it'll happen.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#55

Post by crazygringo »

woeirua wrote: post #50
crazygringo wrote: post #43

> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like. Right... the alternative is to let the senior engineer go, some work gets reshuffled a bit between other senior engineers, and lowest-priority work is delayed until they hire a new senior engineer. It's not that the company is held hostage by the senior engineer, sh…

It’s not how companies work today, but it could be how companies operate in the future. Imagine a situation where single engineers manage a fleet of agents and own entire systems. This is already happening. If that engineer leaves then it’s game over for that system.

It's a basic part of management that you never let any individual employee become irreplaceable. Remember, people get sick and go on vacation too. Managers are always supposed to make sure that tasks and responsibilities can be picked up by someone else.

And the AI that is making it easier for engineers to handle so much more engineering, also makes it easier for a new engineer to take over. They literally just sit down and prompt the AI to start explaining how the current system is set up.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#56

Post by cjbgkagh »

jjmarr wrote: post #51
SR2Z wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market. I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around. If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience. If someone is claiming to be paid belo…

Poeple are not fungible, who’s to say that the individual replacing them is of equal value.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#57

Post by ai-x »

troglodytetrain wrote: post #8

Senior engineers have always owned the application (by knowledge not by law). And that has never been a problem. The real problem is, that without new Juniors there will never be new Seniors, and your company will collapse when your Seniors retire.

The hypothesis is completely wrong. With AI, juniors can catch up with the codebase / domain must faster and deeper than before. It's just a matter of putting time.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#58

Post by bigfatkitten »

hermitShell wrote: post #49

This article touches on an extreme case "what if all your Sr. Engineers are financially independent?" but I think could do more to explore real world examples and address the elephant in the room, compensation through vested shares. I'm not personally experienced about that kind of thing, but I can imagine it helps maintain a healthier balance of power. Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer w…

I worked in a company like this.

The senior engineers, who built the main product that pays the bills have all been there for 25+ years. They held shares in the company back when it was worthless, and now they are all very wealthy. At this point, they literally show up to work just for fun and they aren’t shy about making this known.

The result is that the company has massive insurance policies on these guys in case they die. They also call the shots; they have outsized influence over a range of functions they know absolutely nothing about, ranging from HR to finance to security.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#59

Post by yarekt »

anticensor wrote: post #15
doctaj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t even care about profit! It’s well documented that having long-tenured employees saves you money in a ton of ways (the tangibles are: recruiter fees, ramp-up time, higher pay for new hires… and the intangibles are all the hidden work or keep things running smoothly, building relationships between teams or departments, and innovation). But individuals have to quit to get a market-rate job, and the company en…

They in fact care about control more than they care about profit. I mean control over non-shareholders, including employees and customers, as part of an implied goal of any organisation, control over non-members.

I would say it’s more short term profit. They are happy to cut off the nose and put the rest in the backlog

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#60

Post by yarekt »

except Juniors with Claude are now “seniors”.

In all seriousness even though deep down I know there’s no replacement for experience, I’ve seen a bunch of new people get impressively far with just hacking stuff together. And in the end if you’re making money with that for a long time, isn’t that all that matters to the companies?

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