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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

#61

Post by jjmarr »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #56
jjmarr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People are not fungible but the role frequently is.

You could be an AI infra genius, but if you're in a cookie-cutter consultancy role, that's the salary you're getting.

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

#62

Post by dublinstats »

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…

I'm not an economist but that implies the market maintains some kind of optimal equilibrium price. The reality probably is very noisy like with everything else. Plus there's asymmetric information on both sides meaning people don't get what they think they do.

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

#63

Post by jltsiren »

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…

Only in a market with perfect information. With imperfect information, the market rate is an estimate of the expected or typical rate for a similar good. Because everyone has access to a different subset of the information, everyone's estimate is different, and companies often end up paying above or below the consensus rate.

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

#64

Post by Ferdinandpferd »

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…

No, we are not talking about a commodity market with a clear exchange. If an employee is bad at a negotiation or doesn't look around then they may accept a lower salary than another market participant would have offered and if neither side looks around, and is willing to pay some costs of a change then they are making a salary that is different than the current market rate.

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

#65

Post by piskov »

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…

Hiring the replacement ≠ finding the same or better replacement.

Will you be able to find someone in this economy? Sure

Could you fill the shoes? Much harder. Especially in the age of bootcamps, AI to complete exercises, and what have you where people went into IT for the money and not for the love of the craft, tinkering and learning.

So this is not an oxymoron: you can have 200 applicants and not a single good one to replace someone with them.

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

#66

Post by dublinstats »

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.

From another perspective, the problem is people entering the workforce without sufficient skills to be valuable to employers anymore. The solution would be to spend more time in training so you can reach senior level when you start. Software has been an anomaly among high-paying professions in the low bar for entry. Maybe that's ending.

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

#67

Post by cjbgkagh »

jjmarr wrote: post #61
cjbgkagh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People are not fungible but the role frequently is. You could be an AI infra genius, but if you're in a cookie-cutter consultancy role, that's the salary you're getting.

The role is only ostensively fungible because the org acts like it is, to its detriment. Staff turnover is crazy expensive.

It’s a lemon market with a power play dynamic, one of the main reasons I’m self employed.

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

#68

Post by woeirua »

crazygringo wrote: post #55
woeirua wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

You would hope so, but yet… a lot of people are getting their teams to reap cost savings.

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

#69

Post by carlosjobim »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #41
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…

> the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role. Money doesn't cleanly convert into time. Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior because of the lower expectations and risk. Furt…

> Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.

Hiring is the most important function in any company, full stop.

If they aren't good at hiring, well then they shouldn't be running a company. There are no excuses. If HR aren't up to the task, then they should be replaced, and so on up to the level of the CEO, until whatever incompetence has been flushed out. Shareholders have to demand this.

A company not being able to hire is just as ridiculous as a restaurant not being able to serve food.

If they are receiving a flood of applications which is hard to sift through, they are already doing everything wrong. Shareholders have to nuke these kind of people.

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

#70

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

lukeify wrote: post #39
awakeasleep wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you’re only imagining interchangeable people who dont have bargaining power?

That's probably the bulk of senior developers. We're not all inverting custom proprietary binary trees.

By the same logic, most CEOs are interchangeable. After all, not all of them are creating new markets, shepherding new and exciting business ventures or changing the way we do X.
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