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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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1. Yizahi ◴[30 Sep 25 11:39 UTC] No.45424270{3}[source]▶
Teams are not equivalent in the big or medium org. Some teams are pushing the boundaries (for the corp), some teams are doing grunt work, some teams are doing maintenance, some teams are support for all of those etc. Example - in our company it is often a case when a junior is hired to do lab support or general support, then transitions to a QA team for example, or a junior QA is hired to a steady working team and then transitions to a team doing fire requests and more visible stuff. In the process he acquires both general seniority and a lot of hands on domain knowledge which is complex in our case. Hiring a senior often means skipping only seniority growth, while he still needs a lot time to learn the domain and local quirks. I assume that averaged over years, juniors are still valuable par cost spent. Plus, juniors are sourced from the different pool of people than seniors, meaning more opportunities for a good hire.