Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
Everyone wants to hire senior devs, nobody wants to train junior devs.
It makes sense: juniors are a way bigger risk than seniors and usually leave a company right around the time that they're getting good.
And they have every reason to: companies aren't loyal to workers why should workers be loyal to companies?
But to a corporation that means they spent senior dev time training juniors into seniors for another company to use.
... I'm constantly arguing that we should have more junior devs on the team but we have none.
It's faulty, short-sighted logic though. If every company trained juniors, only for them to jump ship in two years, there'd be a pool of trained juniors to hire from. Yes you wouldn't get your investment out of that particular person, but you'd be hiring someone else's investment.
Beyond that, there's work that is better suited to more junior employees because it's literally a waste of the senior employees' skills.
I mean... That's only if they trained juniors. Juniors have an incredibly hard time getting their first job in programming. Each company is incentivized to snipe juniors from everywhere else instead of train their own.
As a staff software eng - nothing is beneath me. There are some things that only I can do (in theory) but in practice I do everything from minor copy changes to architecting new services. If I need to do something I'm happy to do it.
No one said anything is beneath senior employees.
It's a lost opportunity when you, a staff engineer, spend your time doing something that a junior engineer could do -- instead of doing a task a junior engineer can't do.
I think it's important for seniors to be in the trenches.
I'd expect a senior to be doing "junior" work even if juniors were available to take it on.
It's not all about efficiency: it's about keeping grounded and in touch with the ongoing state of the code base. Which I'd argue you can't get just from reviewing PRs.
I can see what you mean as far as false economies go for the company but in order to have a task fully scoped for a junior to do you need significant amounts of managerial and engineering time spent grooming tickets, updating AC, explicitly enumerating changes.... All of which could be cut through by more senior devs that handle ambiguity better.
Its hard. I'd rather have juniors to delegate to, sure. But I'd most like to have juniors to train. Even if they didn't do anything useful for 6 months.
Again, you're putting words in my mouth. I'm done engaging with you as I don't think you're conversing in good faith.
It wasn't my intention to put words in your mouth. Everything I've said has been an honest reflection of my experience in corporate programming and represents the things I hear managers saying about team composition and division of labor. I'm in meetings with members of the c-suite talking about these things specifically.
I get you don't think it makes sense for a corporation to do. I'm trying to say regardless of that - the executives are acting in what they see as very rational self interest.