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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 1 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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hibikir ◴[30 Sep 25 03:54 UTC] 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 ◴[30 Sep 25 04:03 UTC] 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 ◴[30 Sep 25 04:21 UTC] 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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_heimdall ◴[30 Sep 25 04:57 UTC] No.45422035[source]▶
As an industry we can't just cut off the pipeline of future senior devs.

This is the fundamental contradiction of LLMs. The promise today is that the tooling can largely replace juniors, and honestly that may be true.

The hope behind that promise, though, is that the tech will catch up with senior devs before the pipeline dries up and that we have found a sustainable social and economic model before humans truly aren't employable at any meaningful numbers. That hope seems ill placed to me, but I guess we'll see if we develop such skilled LLM or similar tools at all.

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nickff ◴[30 Sep 25 05:42 UTC] No.45422287[source]▶
The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18 months, it’s not worth training up juniors because the employer will never get to benefit. It seems that we’re in an unfortunate, but stable equilibrium.
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1. kogepathic ◴[30 Sep 25 06:19 UTC] No.45422490{5}[source]▶
> The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18 months, it’s not worth training up juniors because the employer will never get to benefit.

It is absolutely worth hiring and training juniors. The quality of your onboarding process and documentation will improve. Not only that but a junior will ask questions that senior engineers take for granted, such as "why are we doing X this way?" which can lead to improvements that your existing engineers might not have considered.

Finally, if junior engineers are joining your organisation and leaving every 9-18 months, you need to take a serious look at your career progression ladder and compensation. I have seen way too many companies that have an arbitrary "you cannot receive a promotion in the first X months" HR policy which is just asinine. You know who doesn't have this stupid policy? The company your junior just accepted an offer from.

If your organisation doesn't have the tools and processes to up skill junior engineers into seniors, then it doesn't have professional development for senior engineers and is just a career dead end.