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> You hire for needs in the next 12 months.

That's like, your opinion, man. Why can't you hire long-term? If all you plan for is short-term, it will only work short-term, and it should be no surprise if on the longer term you fail or you find yourself in a world of pain.

> I see this as a byproduct of product development time. MVP and its associated stuff... It's all about short horizons,

I think you severely misunderstand MVP... it's not at all about short horizons, on the contrary. It's about doing the right thing in the longer term. To put "MVP" in a hiring context - the right "MVP" attitude is to hire temporarily to see whether the person is right for the job - and once you determine you've got a good fit, invest massively in that person to make sure you've got a long-term employee (don't just skim him/her for short-term profit, but invest to build a long-lasting relationship).

> Entire companies are built around 3-6 year horizons from cenception to exit.

I've yet to see that work (and not in the sense that "lottery works" - nobody seriously suggests buying lots of lottery tickets if you want to get rich.

..if all you plan for is short-term, it will only work short-term..

My point exactly, only in reverse. In industries (eg, merchant banking, corporate law, industrial engineering) where the plans are longer term, the thinking is longer term. Here you see highly involved onboarding programs with mentorship, in depth training and such.

Uber, FB, snapchat, netflix or whatnot never had plans that really looked past 2-3 years into the future. Ambitions, possibly. That's different to plans. These are on the young/ADD end of the spectrum, but they have cultural influence industry-wide.

I disagree about MVP. First, I don't think short horizon is bad, it's choice with advantages and disadvantages. Second, I do think MVP is part of a wider, shorter horizon planning mentality. That has certainly been my experience. The idea (IMO) is that instead of planning, you evolve. Evolution and planning are at odds with eachother, to an extent. You can make decisions early, and you get a longer term plan to work with. You can make decisions just-in-time (eg after launching an MVP), this gets you more informed decisions. That's not necessarily related to HR. You're hiring and onboarding could be unrelated to your product and engineering plans (or lack thereof). But (again, in practice), I think that mentality is influenced by these things.

^That's like, your opinion, man. ...always ;)

"I've yet to see that work" ... Uber. Netflix' streaming service.... for large, famous examples. Call those lotteries if you want. They're definitely risky. You may not like high risk strategies but they are a big part of the software industry, especially on the culturally influential wing.

> In industries (eg, merchant banking, corporate law, industrial engineering) where the plans are longer term, the thinking is longer term

I work in banking at the moment, and the thinking is anything but longer term. Management is so desperate to hire enough qualified developers that it fills a lot of the vacancies with contractors, which are, by company's definition, temporary. So, in other words, the company is already planning to let go of people who will build its vital systems. That's myopic thinking at its finest.

What's interesting is that big part of enterprise market in, for example, London seems to operate like that - management pretends that people are replaceable cogs that hold no company-specific knowledge and require no ramp-up time. The stupidity of it is mind-boggling.

> Uber. Netflix' streaming service

I really don't think that Uber and Netflix hired for the short term. Especially Netflix. How did you get that? Netflix in particular seems to have been playing the long game for quite a while.

Netflix has an unusual hr history, worth looking up if you're interested in that sort of thing.

To be fair to the parent commenter, I think the short time horizons are based on how startups are funded. We get 12-18 months funding per round. Everything starts from that - planning, etc. If you work at a large enterprise, then interns have a different role - normally it's more like a long interview process. But for startups, I don't agree with it, but I understand why there is little mentoring.

> Why can't you hire long-term?

You can, but I have never been offered a multi-year employment contract. Employers seem to prefer the flexibility of being able to terminate employment sooner than that.

If someone is on a permanent contract then their employment cannot simply be terminated ever. They can be made redundant, which means that the role cannot be refilled, or they can be fired but only after going through a disciplinary procedure (In the UK these rules only comes into effect after the first 2 years of employment).

So charge the self employed contractor rates then

In my opinion, attitudes similar to yours are toxic to this industry.

I've been working >10 years as a software engineer. If I'd never worked on a (necessarily) complicated system(s), I could maybe understand your viewpoint. Churning out the same CRUD app with minor differences would probably be safe enough to expect a junior dev to 'have at it'.

> Everything is fast

Unfortunately, this is the current 'thinking' on how some un-enlightened people think the industry should work. Ultimately, I think this is a load of nonsense. Software engineering is engineering. Some people may have snuck in & survived as they never had to do something non trivial & deal with the resulting consequences.

Where did I say that?! I never said junior devs should work independently.

Anyway ,it's not about how people think the industry should work it's about how it does work. This is a fast industry, irl. People change jobs more frequently. Companies grow faster. Products go from conception to release faster. Financial horizons are shorter.

A big chunk of the 2018 industry did not exist in 2008. Mobile, for example. Not the companies, not the specializations. It's not philosophy. It's reality. I'm talking about side effects of this reality.

No one at Snapchat thinks "we'll hire this kid, he'll make a great engineering manager in 15 years." They do in some industries. We're on the other end of the spectrum.

If 1/3 of you developers are eating all of your mentoring time I would think that either you've made a hiring mistake, or lack appropriate teaching tools.

In one case you've hired someone who isn't ready to do the tasks you need without excessive scaffolding. In the other you're not providing enough structure and scaffolding for the intern to succeed with help.

Mentoring, particularly in the legal context of what makes an intern, an intern and not a Jr. Developer ought to be a short run project, and frankly if you can't commit time to providing an educational experience you shouldn't be filling your staffing needs with an intern at all.

This has happened to me, but what it exposed was the hiring process gave absolutely no indication of whether the person could code. The 3 juniors assigned to me were interviewed by the VP, and I under him had no say or insight into the hiring process. 2 of them did super well and are now senior devs. One of them took up 30-40% of my time (with my putting up boundaries) and the basic understanding of the platform we were using never clicked for him.

The thing is - they got 2 very driven loyal devs out of it, and cheaper than normal at first. They also had an assessment period of 3 months after which the one who would take up all my time was let go. It was absolutely worth it for the company.