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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. x0x0 ◴[30 Sep 25 19:36 UTC] No.45430184{3}[source]▶
It's a hiring pipeline. You're growing modestly underpriced internal talent that, in the upside case, has skills that front-run their salary by a bit. NB: I'm obviously not advocating for underpaying people; just noting that that good junior eng will grow fast and their salary will take time to catch up.

It's stupidly expensive though if you look at the opportunity cost of that already-onboarded senior/lead/staff eng time. And this was obviously more compelling when it was super hard to hire senior talent.