This is true. But there’s a corollary:

Please do not hire junior engineers unless your team/org has the bandwidth for proper mentorship.

Hiring a junior engineer is a commitment - you need to be willing to invest at least 1-2 years. A lot of teams aren’t set up for this. https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1289971748725719040

Some more things to consider:

- inexperienced managers aren’t probably the best suited to hire and mentor junior engineers, unless these managers themselves have mentorship/guidance from senior managers/leadership folks. A bad manager can be a horrendous formative experience.

- mentoring junior devs remotely presents unique challenges. A lot of what I learned as a junior engineer was via osmosis - listening to conversations other senior engineers were having, even if I wasn’t a part of the conversation. This is hard to replicate in a remote setting.

I’m all for bringing more junior folks into this industry. Senior engineers don’t grow on trees. Hiring and mentoring junior talent can be a huge competitive advantage.

I only wish more conversations focused on the *tactical challenges* involved in pulling this off successfully.

More tactical challenges in hiring juniors:

- your senior engineers will be less productive if they spend a considerable amount of their time pairing/teaching/mentoring. If you mission critical projects to ship on a deadline, this can pose a huge problem. https://twitter.com/vitorrigonibx/status/1289996936385138688?s=21 https://twitter.com/vitorrigonibx/status/1289996936385138688

- you need to ensure you have the right number of “starter projects” over the course of 1-2 years - work interesting/important enough for the junior engineer to feel they’re a part of the team and doing important work, and yet not *critical* to your immediately deliverables.

- if you’re going to ask one of your senior engineers to mentor someone new/junior, then the senior engineer is making a commitment as well. Which might impact the kind of projects they might get to work on themselves.

Also the average tenure of a Silicon Valley engineer is .... 18-24m, lol. There are exceptions to this rule, but this is how it plays out at a staggeringly large number of companies.

this can mean you as a manager are making an investment where you might never see the payoff.

Now in blog post format - because all tweet threads need to be blog posts IMO

https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1290019835569532928?s=21 https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1290019835569532928