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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

You need senior engineers in order to scale training people, so it's a catch-22.

It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.

Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.

I would love to be an architect. It's all concepts and not really implementation beyond proof of concept. Concepts and problem solving is right up my alley. Unfortunately I need to be at least a senior dev before they will consider me. Plus it's like double my salary. Oh well.

At Mozilla at least, the architects are all some of the best programmers I know. They implement huge swaths of the architecture they propose.

That's nice. The people who are architects at my company are generally very good developers since you have to be a highly regarded senior dev to even be considered to the position. They don't work on the implementation though.

> The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.

I don't really see it that way. Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways.

> Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways.

For the first N months, sure, but then, you have a senior and a trained junior, who is hopefully on their way to being a mid. So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes.

But like any upfront investment, there is a time when the costs outweigh the benefits, especially in the early days.

The "investment" part of the equation is where I see that model breaking down and failing. There's a lot of poaching and job-hopping, especially motivated by total comp. You could say it's always been that way, but in terms of the senior/mid/junior spread it seems like in our industry, employers would rather hire another senior than hire a junior who needs investment.

"So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes."

Too bad companies don't see it that way.

Well, I've been part of companies that have seen it that way, so they're out there!

But I agree, too few companies have that perspective.

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