There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

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.

Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.

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?

Because the junior grows into a senior in a couple of years and the company is better off for it

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%.