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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

#71

Post by crazygringo »

woeirua wrote: post #68
crazygringo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making sure that no employee is irreplaceable doesn't really have much to do with cost savings.

It's just about how you assign work, rotate what people work on, code reviews are a part of it, etc.

None of this has anything to do with AI. If anything, the way that best practices around AI involve lots of design documents, tests, markdown, etc. can actually make it much easier for a new employee to continue where a previous employee left off.

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

#73

Post by Teever »

xyzelement wrote: post #12
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…

This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?

When you pay someone to do sensitive work like plumbing or electrical work in your house do you go for the cheapest guy? Why or why not?

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

#74

Post by carlosjobim »

xyzelement wrote: post #12
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…

This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?

You're making the wrong comparison. If your plumber increases his rate by 40%, will you "fire" him and get another plumber which will also be 40% more expensive, or a plumber which costs the old price but isn't good, or accept his price increase?

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

#75

Post by ajmurmann »

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…

Knowledge and tacit knowledge of the system and company around it makes a huge difference.

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

#76

Post by ritcgab »

yarekt wrote: post #60

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?

They aren't. They act like seniors. But that is all the business needs.

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

#77

Post by flowerthoughts »

1. This is already the situation if you don't have technical knowledge in-house and outsource all development.

2. Yes, if you only have few people who know how to use a powerful tool, they might have leverage.

3. The supply-demand mechanism is certainly there, but the time scale is never mentioned. It'll take time to remove the unemployed juniors from the pool (maybe they get sucked up into other jobs.) It'll take time for seniors to realize they have leverage. And, of course, the company must not have rehired junior engineers for other reasons (e.g. because the coding tools become so good that seniors are not needed.)

Any objections about "this thesis isn't true; look around you" needs to take this into account. The argument is not that we're there now, but that there's a mechanism to lead there.

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

#79

Post by avereveard »

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…

as knowledge is commoditized the bar for junior raises, what was advanced math research a century ago is now undergrads' homework. I don't see why code is so special in that regard that cannot progress beyond artisanship.

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

#80

Post by iszomer »

carlosjobim wrote: post #69
Quarrelsome wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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.

That's why some companies will contract with temp agencies for relief.

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