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Comment by screenoridesagb | Hacker News Reader

Junior Developer: Let’s get everything done! Senior Developer: nah nah projects don’t matter as much as using whatever tech stack I’m used to.

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Exactly opposite in my experience. Seniors (10+ years experience) knows what programming language or library or paradigm or monolith or microservice you use isn't THAT important they all have their problems and everything is a tradeoff.

Juniors rewrite code to use their favorite language, rewrite to microservices, etc.

But it could be we just have different definitons of "senior". The ones with a couple years experience, enough knowledge to be dangerous but not yet lots of experience and not seen enough bad stuff yet are the worst...

Senior developer wants job security having an unsupportable project or two doesn’t matter because 99% of the job is stretching deadline to line up with vacations.

Making projects supportable is good. Not distinguishing between objectively bad code, and code that you just don't understand right away because you didn't write it yourself and you do not yet have enough training to skim and understand other's codebases yet is not.

Not sure where you’re working, but your senior devs are quite misinformed.

Every layoff I’ve witnessed sliced quite a bit off the top because they’re the most expensive. Absolutely no regard for who was maintaining what legacy projects, often leading to months of setbacks while the remaining engineering staff tries to understand a critical yet unsexy tool or service that no one else was willing to touch.

Having “special” projects is in no way a form of job security.

If your business is operating like this it’s not sustainable. You need 10 developers for every project so the senior developers can complain about meetings instead of exposing themselves to code review. That helps there supposed knowledge.

In my experience, this is backwards, though not always.

I've had a mix of it, but I am also often the guy trying to push a reason to use the new tech. Not necessarily a stack but usually a new database or service that fits the problem space well.

I have the opposite experience: junior developers tend not to do research on the tech stack and just use whatever framework they know with some shiny libraries on top of it.

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