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263 points mooreds | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hibikir ◴[] No.45421738[source]
Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.

So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill companies.

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goalieca ◴[] No.45421781[source]
Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.
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throwawaysleep ◴[] No.45421859[source]
I guess what’s the value of the junior there? Why is that superior to just having the seniors have their heads down coding and not being pestered by a junior?
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1. jrockway ◴[] No.45421905{3}[source]
There are a lot of projects that involve very little of high level experience and a lot of grinding things. Juniors can be very good at these, and there are probably enough micro-problems that aren't critical that their brain is still being used and they're gaining skills that will help them take on more complicated tasks.

Something I last worked on with a junior engineer was our in-place backup system. I designed it and wrote the tricky part that involves DLL hell in a docker container. He wrote the "list backups", "delete backups", "create backup" CRUD API and CLI. My time was then free to put out fires or design something new.

It's not necessarily a no-brainer to hire and mentor junior engineers like the article says, but it's something you should think about. You will be surprised how much people actually know at job #1, and how quickly they can take on more complicated work that pays back your time investment in their mentorship. Plus, someone probably trained you to get you to where you are today, so there is some fairness in continuing the cycle.