| Companies rarely fire tenured staff except for layoffs. Often this is due to issues such as - Tenured staff have a track record, if they are suddenly under-performing it seems more likely that their manager is to blame. Rather than a lack of ability. - Tenured staff have institutional knowledge which can be hard to estimate and replace, the fact that a bad engineer still knows why something was done a certain way and can help others is sometimes sufficient. - Tenured staff sometimes have implicit responsibilities that are unclear to new hires. An engineer with 10 years in the company might spend almost all of their time doing some form of product/tech leadership. The rare times they write code it may be deficient in some manner or another. - Tenured staff know how to read the tea leaves. The fact that they are still with the company likely indicates that they know how to avoid situations where they will get let go. Sometimes this is as simple as hopping on maintenance work for profitable systems. On the other hand, a new engineer doing their first project may actually not have the skills to get the project done. Or, more likely they were hired for new initiatives that leadership is fundamentally skeptical of. |