[HN Gopher] Hiring ONLY seniors is the worst policy in the softw...
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       Hiring ONLY seniors is the worst policy in the software industry
        
       Author : samspenc
       Score  : 8 points
       Date   : 2024-01-23 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zaidesanton.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zaidesanton.substack.com)
        
       | iainctduncan wrote:
       | So the article doesn't site sources, but it looks to me like
       | another dev sharing "expertise" based on 1 data point (his
       | experience of one team, one product).
       | 
       | I work in technical diligence, we assess companies getting
       | purchased, getting ready to exit, raising money, etc. I've done
       | 50+ myself, read reports for hundreds more, and Crosslake (my
       | employer) has done thousands. This is not our experience.
       | 
       | Overspend on dev team is _occasionally_ an issue. Key person
       | risks, tech debt, and other symptoms of lack of expertise are
       | _frequently_ serious issues. (No amount of juniours eliminates
       | key person risk on a senior, only a similarly expert senior
       | does). The companies I have seen that made policies of hiring
       | smaller teams of the best people they can find and paying them
       | well were, in general, kicking ass.
       | 
       | I would argue this article has it completely backwards. My
       | opinion, based on anecdotal (because I didn't run stats on it)
       | but much larger sample size is that the difference to your
       | company over the long term of senior vs junior dwarfs the
       | difference in cost. We are _constantly_ saying  "hire more
       | seniors in X,Y,Z". We are rarely saying "cut dev spend".
       | 
       | My advice: for your core offering, buy the best devs you can and
       | make them happy. For all the peripheral commodity stuff (the "not
       | rocket science"), outsource to Eastern Europe and have a full
       | time senior based locally who job is to run that team,
       | interfacing with their lead and managing integration with your
       | core.
       | 
       | Especially right now. Preferring juniors when the market is full
       | of freshly unemploye ace seniors would be terrifically stupid.
        
         | wtatum wrote:
         | Having been the target of a Crosslake report a few times it
         | felt like the process was actually almost entirely focused on
         | points like this. Key person risk, talent acquisition pipeline,
         | process maturity, "definition of done", etc. It felt like
         | "hard" tech debt items around code quality, measured SLA
         | performance, etc were present for the sake of completeness but
         | were of almost no consequence to the Crosslake team or those
         | who would read the report.
         | 
         | Does that mirror your experience working in DD?
        
       | thesnide wrote:
       | Best is to hire a mix, but code like only juniors come in. As a
       | senior is always a temporary junior at first when hired.
       | 
       | https://blog.pwkf.org/2022/09/18/always-optimize-for-dummies...
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-23 23:02 UTC)