[Chyzwar]

Some people never reach Senior level, both on skill level and impact. Judging someone level purely on time is a sure way to promote incompetent and lose talent that is developing faster than average. Organization promoting mediocrity, where people are awarded with random bonuses instead of opportunities.

How can you expect anything substantial from senior developers if you promoted them purely on experience measured in time?. How anybody would be motived if they can just wait for promotion? How can hire people on senior positions if you do not have internal metrics for these positions? How can you get rid of underperformers?

[fhd2]

Exceptions exist. Sometimes I might want to hire someone with a lot of experience who doesn't provide value relative to that, I can still do it, but be very transparent about that with them. Experience in itself is valuable regardless of whether or not I can find a little system that quantifies that for me. And another important question is: Should seniors really earn that much more than juniors? Those are the kind of questions I ask myself before making exceptions.

If you have someone very experienced with a high market value who doesn't really pay off in terms of what value you can extract from them, it can make sense to look into an exit - or an exception.

With the amount of people I managed in the past, I rarely had to make exceptions. Your mileage may absolutely vary though, and there's certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. Management is hard, easy solutions and "best" practices rarely exist.

[Chyzwar]

> Exceptions exist. Sometimes I might want to hire someone with a lot of experience who doesn't provide value relative to that, I can still do it, but be very transparent about that with them. Experience in itself is valuable regardless of whether or not I can find a little system that quantifies that for me. And another important question is: Should seniors really earn that much more than juniors? Those are the kind of questions I ask myself before making exceptions.

Seniors can do things that are hard or impossible for juniors. A good senior developer can bootstrap a project to MVP, establish best practices, onboard and mentor juniors/mid, communicate effectively with stockholders. Senior can manage technical debt and help with estimation and roadmap. Even on purely technical output, they can be few times more efficient than juniors. Many people will fail to learn these skills even after many years working as developers. Experience is important, but overall it is a smaller part of the overall skill set of a developer. I know plenty of people of 10+ years of experience that are just mid level developers and will stay this way.

> If you have someone very experienced with a high market value who doesn't really pay off in terms of what value you can extract from them, it can make sense to look into an exit - or an exception.

If you do not have metrics other than experience, then how you can know what value to expect? I get the feeling that you hired senior developers and then put them into mid/junior level roles and responsibilities. Value that you get from senior developers depends on opportunities that you give them.

> With the amount of people I managed in the past, I rarely had to make exceptions. Your mileage may absolutely vary though, and there's certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. Management is hard, easy solutions and "best" practices rarely exist.

That there reason why software in Europe losing to US. You decided on an easy solution to measure developers by experience in years instead of actual output. You want to extract value instead of create a value. Furthermore, you also do not want to pay senior developers because you do not understand the unique value that they can bring to the table.