[spyhi]

A senior engineer can work through a hard problem assigned to a junior engineer, resulting in a well-implemented hard feature and a less junior engineer. Just because a junior engineer is working on it doesn’t mean by default it’s an easy problem—how are you going to grow your engineers otherwise?

[wizerdrobe]

Some firms simply hire nothing but Seniors. You trained up a Junior-Mid-Senior? Cool, well offer him 20k more and call it a day.

[jen20]

> Some firms simply hire nothing but Seniors

The firms that claim to do that almost invariably do not hire people with 20 years of experience, they hire people with 2 years of experience 10 times over. Sometimes that's fine. Usually it's not.

[alex_lav]

This seems like nothing more than a desire to gatekeep experience? Being employed as a programmer means you're gaining experience...Even if you work at a single company for 20 years, you're not going to get some mythical competence that you could only get by staying in one area. This line of thinking seems like nonsense.

[jen20]

Whether you have a single year of experience 10 times (or whatever ratio you experience) is orthogonal to whether you work for the same company.

Being employed as a programmer may or may not gain you new experience (which is what matters if you are to be a good generalist). Whether it does depends on whether you are _doing things new to you_ while being employed.

[alex_lav]

Doing new things is experience. Repetition in one area is also experience. This concept you're describing is just made up.

[jen20]

Sorry, no. What you have just described is being a generalist vs a specialist.

Also, all concepts are “made up”. By definition.

[zerbinxx]

Agreed, I will almost always take someone with 5 years of experience at a couple of good shops rather than 20 years of experience broken up across 10 different ones.

[mattmanser]

Really? I have a lot of 2 year stints, as well as some clients I worked with for 5+ years that always invariably turned into occasional month here and there.

Often the long-term guys I met are the shit guys who are coasting, still writing code as if it were 2005.

Worse still is when their language knowledge has coalesced around an old language version and they're not using any of the new stuff, as I've seen code bases that are entirely incompatible with new libraries.

Like all new libraries generally depend on DI, but all the code is written in static methods and classes so nothing can be easily injected and you get all sorts of threading issues when you try.

[zerbinxx]

Well there you said it, you work some places for 5+ years, therefore I would strongly consider you. The main reason is that longer stints give you an opportunity to become a master with at least one set of tools. If you interview and are apparently not masterful with your own toolset, then I’ve caught a coaster. I’ve found that it’s much harder to acquire this signal vs. noise thing with exclusively 2 year stint people because they spend half of their life on boarding or unemployed.

Also, I get what you’re saying, but DI was around in 2005 and some good engineers (older than I) were using it back then. It seems lot of good ideas skipped a generation!

[theshrike79]

This, sadly, needs to change.

The pool for experienced senior level talent won't grow unless _someone_ spends the resources to hire and train juniors.

The incentive being that they can keep the best juniors for themselves and let the others back into the pool for others.