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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and many startups feel that they can’t compete with some of the top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives.

Offer to teach the developer something.

"Java developers - want to learn Node and React?"

"Rails developers - want to learn Elixir?"

Get one senior person on staff who really knows the stack well and require that they pair program every day with a different member of the team.

Good developers are grateful for the opportunity to level up their skills, contribute, and still make a living.

Andres Camacho in SF has been VP of Engineering and CTO at several startups and is king of this strategy.

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> "Java developers - want to learn Node and React?"

Could be a great incentive, but not to me personally. I'm very invested in the JVM, and I'd rather have that investment used. Something like the following would make me jump ship instantly:

"Java developers - want to use Flink/Spark, some Scala/Clojure? How about 'very fast decision trees' learned online out of a Kafka bus?"

If good developers want to level up their skills, how do you keep the senior developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?

Mentorship and teaching are also valuable skills. Many good senior engineers would love to focus on them if their employer recognized it as valuable.

Yea, um, nothing wrong with mentoring and teaching but when management wants me to turn things out on a dime at the same time. Not happening. That junior is getting MINIMAL possible attention for me to work on what ultimately keeps my job not theirs.

Is that really true? Maybe some, but I don’t know about “many”. I’d imagine when most people start on their dev career, they don’t imagine their dream job to be “teaching,” they imagine it to be coding. I think you’d have a tough time getting responses for a “senior engineer” job ad that says you’ll actually be a full time mentor.

I'm just an anecdote, but if I could earn the same salary teaching and mentoring as I do as a tech lead I'd do it with very little hesitation.

This route exists, it's called training and you can earn even more doing that. Absolutely doable, but it's a long road to get there (salary- and lifestyle wise).

Even then, pair programming with a different person every day sounds awful.

Fair question.

At least in the above scenario, it was Andres doing the work of initially getting someone up to speed and then pairing the coworkers on an appropriate level feature/bug. He'd stop by and check in to see where they were stuck and would genuinely try and solve the problem.

So, it has to be someone who is a great coder for that stack and enjoys teaching.

If it's done right, other members of the team become good teachers as well, so the initial burden of teaching is lightened.

> how do you keep the senior developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?

Pay them well, and give them a regular chunk of (paid) time to work on something that furthers their growth / is intellectually stimulating / whatever.

Pay them a lot.

A certain pay level is necessary, but not sufficient, to keep talented staff.

Well, they probably chose the tech stack so they can either help with the hiring process or the training process.

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