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263 points mooreds | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
1. JohnBooty ◴[] No.45422258[source]
Hiring too many junior engineers is killing companies...

...although this is a fault of management, not the juniors. I've seen the following at two companies:

- Large, complex codebases

- Management hires a bunch of juniors because they're cheaper

- The juniors "move fast and break things" and write a lot of extremely high tech debt code

- Management, lacking the ability or will to understand tech debt, think these juniors are productive because they see short-term productivity but cannot understand the medium- and long-term ramifications

- The juniors, not knowing better, don't realize the damage they're causing (again, not their fault)

- At some point the juniors outnumber the seniors and the lunatics are running the asylum. (More politically crafty seniors utilize this to their advantage and cultivate fiefdoms of juniors)

I am of course speaking in generalities. There are amazing juniors and terrible seniors. I have been in this career long enough to see the same things over and over, so I stand by my generalizations. However... I have also seen enough exceptions to know that you can't judge pre-judge any particular individual by "years of experience" or any other metric.