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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

there's one issue that large companies face, after two/three years all the juniors in the "surgery team" model start looking at position of seniority within or outside the company, causing high concentrated turnover in such built teams.

the surgical team is great in a crunch but long term you need to stagger your turnover to keep competency on the project high.

this isn't as relevant on team that are building projects as they were in the mmm time, today companies tend to build service software that has maybe the same shelf life but gets continuously improved instead of being dropped whole and left into maintenance mode.

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That sounds like a secondary management problem to have other projects lined up. Although that isn't new - one or two years is already an effectively encouraged time to look for new jobs because raises don't keep up and changing jobs is the current defacto way to raise salaries. Seems like a needless expense and hassle to all involved and yet it seems strongly preferred oddly.

> after two/three years all the juniors in the "surgery team" model start looking at position of seniority within or outside the company, causing high concentrated turnover in such built teams

Is that a problem?

I mean, the same thing happens with literal surgeons/doctors and residency, where their early years of career eventually end and they expect a mid-level position in the organization.

It sounds like a healthy industry that juniors/apprentices work under journeymen and masters at a large organization early in their career, then move up or branch out after a few years.

I'm not sure why companies expect to be able to cost-optimize away a functioning economy, but remain in business.

while moving on is natural for the persons to a software company it's a costly proposition and quite different than surgeon teams, because while humans are all more or less similar projects are wildly different so there's less interchangeability.

also while surgeon tend to specialize into one in the many fields, programmers that rise in a "surgical team" tend to become of the "full stack" variety

> not sure why companies expect to be able to cost-optimize away a functioning economy

I'm with you here, I'm not stating this is the optimal way to handle the issue, just reporting the patterns I saw on many workplaces of all kind I've ben into

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