Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

Yup, but trust me, he didn't know that.

It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior devs don't make things worse.

And most failures of junior devs (breaking stuff) are considered the responsibility of the senior dev managing them, so the senior dev bears just as much responsibility as before but now with less control and more unpredictability. It is certainly good to have juniors on the team, but managing them should not take the greatest part of your senior devs' time, and your product should not be written exclusively by juniors.

Some CEOs deflect accusations of cheapness by claiming they don't want "rockstars/divas," but that's a personality trait, not a skill, and the crappiest of crappy junior devs are certainly capable of embodying rockstar arrogance.

Most work is tweaking an existing codebase, and quick fluency in arbitrary code written by strangers is definitely not a junior-level skill. In fact, CS-heavy stuff with little external integration is perfect for fresh graduates, as they did learn it in school.

> 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.

I assume that by "absorbed" you mean "becomes less visible"? I prefer this style of organization as well, but even so the cost is still there, it is just not broken out as a line item.

>> 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.

It really isn't that simple. You can think of people as people and care about them. But once you accept that you need to hire more, you've also got a very concrete need to get a butt in that seat NOW so that they can take a load off of the valued employees who are stretched too thin.

That said, here is an exercise that I highly recommend.

It is easy to look at businesses through the filter of how we think that they should be run. And every stupid thing that they do becomes confirmation that you are smart, they are stupid, and the world is a bizarre place. People who do this wind up with a lot of strongly held ideas about how the world should be run, and they are mostly not very good ideas.

Turn that around. Start with the assumption that people who are acting in bizarre to you ways are actually competent and know something that you don't. Start trying to figure out what it is that they know which you haven't figured out. As you start figuring those things out, suddenly they will look a lot smarter, and YOU will actually be smarter.

In my experience, people who indulge in that exercise become more effective at their jobs, and if they are interested in climbing the corporate hierarchy, they are in a much better position to do so.

Yes. It obviously isn't a slam dunk, "Never train."

But businesses that don't do a lot of training aren't necessarily being stupid.

Also,

We only hire devs who can traverse a tree with their eyes clsoed.

Why? Is that what your devs do in day to day job?

No, our devs add buttons and pass values from one module to another.