There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

That's fine if you can compensate them accordingly to retain them, but if you're going to pay them senior level in a couple of years, why not just hire a senior level to begin with?

Because highly experienced seniors are rarely on the job market.

>The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.

>The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.

>The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant. [Replace Eclipse with $HOT_TECHNOLOGY, like AI agents this year.]

>If you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, they show up on the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they actually send their resume out to what they think are the few places they’d like to work at in Anchorage.

>But for the most part, great developers (and this is almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get to work wherever they want, so they honestly don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs.

- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

Most of the best programmers I know have worked 2-3 tech jobs. An internship or entry level job, a cushy job at a major company, and either retirement or a third job that they took because the problem was incredibly interesting and they got nerd sniped. I even saw the "medical internship" scenario happen once; a great colleague of mine had to move to France for his partner's career in medicine, so he quit his job and found something over there.

This might be true if you are looking for some top 0.5% talent to solve the cutting edge most difficult challenges in tech, but for the vast majority of companies building basic apps and saas products, there’s a large pool of talent to pick from.

In my experience hiring, its not just the top 0.5%, more like the top 30-50%.

People aren’t fungible. The senior engineer you’ve trained for a couple years is way more effective than the one that joined yesterday.

But also is paid less than a new joiner.

At most places yeah

I think HN's demographic skews young and commenters here vastly overestimate how many of us are constantly job hopping every 3 years.

Yeah especially as you age the healthcare policy can become as important as pay. Have known plenty of people who got most of their value from health benefits + stock plans rather than the base salary.

Most companies aren’t Apple, Nvidia, or Google chasing the top 0.1% of “elite” talent. Outside of a few AI-focused startups, the reality is that 90% of companies are sitting on legacy codebases, still running VMs, or duct-taping CRUD apps together with APIs.

If you happen to be a superstar with a rare niche skill (like building frontier AI models), you basically skip the interview loop and get fought over with million-dollar offers. But that’s a tiny fraction of the market.

For everyone else, hiring looks a lot like dating: both sides aim for a “10,” but usually settle for a “6 or 7.” And the whole process is signaling—candidates overstate their skills, companies oversell their culture and tech stack, and the match lands somewhere in the middle.

Probably the most important non-technical skill is dealing with the egos in the industry since you will come across a lot of them.