[henryfjordan]

Experience costs $$$, and there is always some more basic or straight-forward work to do in addition to the cutting-edge stuff. If a junior-level engineer can work with the senior, they can do those lesser tasks for less money and let the higher-payed people tackle the harder tasks (and get some experience!)

[geggam]

I am experienced and biased because of that obviously but I have seen so many train wrecks created with this method.

The amount of waste in corporate american and startups is insane. IMO

There are solutions experienced folks know that save so much money when you look at the big picture it always baffles me when I see that..

The other thing that baffles me is when a CIO makes choices based off of things he has read online instead of taking the business need and finding the most economical solution

If you are interested in making money finding technical solutions with known failures is the key. Experience always knows those.

Just a perspective and comment to an opposing. Not arguing.

[henryfjordan]

It's all a fancy optimization problem. Each project can be broken into tasks that take X amount of skill/experience and you have workers with varying skill. If you only have high-value workers, you'll be wasting a lot of skill/experience on the menial tasks. If you only have low-value workers then some projects will fail because none of them meet the skill thresholds.

As a company you want a diversity of workers to allow you to better optimize.

[geggam]

There is some merit to that but what I see over and over is companies try to use too much.

Most menial tasks senior guys have figured out how to automate. We hate menial repetitive tasks and find ways to eliminate them so the ROI of having a senior guy is yes payroll is higher but you have less headcount.

There really isnt anything new being done. Containers have been around for ages ( Solaris doms / freebsd jails )

What I see is companies prematurely optimizing by saying they need portability and multi cloud strategies before they have achieved profitability.

Multi cloud is expensive and difficult and if you don't have a successful business you really don't need it to be portable.

Just some observations from someone watching various business models

[johnmarcus]

Another reason is 'experienced' developers can sometimes be difficult to work with. They can be arrogant and bull headed, 'my way or the highway' sorta attitudes. Negative to others with new ideas, etc. Teams that already have some vets on them like working with Jr folks precisely because they are moldable.

[geggam]

Good read for you

http://boringtechnology.club/

I'll leave this one alone as opinionated experienced guys get like that for a reason

[johnmarcus]

I've seen that before, it has some good points. I don't think an experienced person has to - or always does - get like I described. But it does happen.

The question was "why higher less senior people?" My answer, and perhaps I wasn't clear, was that for your first 1-5 devs, you should definitely higher senior...but once you break past that then your senior devs - you know the ones who launched all that boring technology - then want Jr devs to mold into doing things the right way from the start.