[pydry]

The problem the industry faces isnt that juniors dont grow it's that they spend up to 18 months being a drain on productivity after which point they tend to leave.

Who would pay for that?

Not a lot of companies, which acts as a filter.

As it turns out, a few companies do because they are super strapped for cash. That's why a lot of junior first experiences are a trial by fire in environments that are on another level of dysfunction working with either no seniors or bottom of the barrel seniors.

This acts as another filter. Some juniors give up at this point.

These filters prevent junior engineers from becoming senior. This is actually pretty good for seniors - being a rare, in demand commodity usually is.

I dont think AI changes this calculus much except insofar as AI amplifies the capacity for juniors to build ever bigger code jenga towers.

[ochronus]

> The problem the industry faces isnt that juniors dont grow it's that they spend up to 18 months being a drain on productivity after which point they tend to leave.

Thankfully, that's not my experience with most juniors. Again, my experience is limited (as all of ours is), but if you filter juniors well during hiring, you can get a wonderful set of high-potential learning machines, who, with the right mentors, grow like crazy.

[pydry]

Ive worked with a bunch of great juniors too. None of this changes the fact that they cant hit the ground running, they make mistakes which have to be unpicked and mentoring them eats up time.

[rcxdude]

>The problem the industry faces isnt that juniors dont grow it's that they spend up to 18 months being a drain on productivity after which point they tend to leave.

This is largely a result of the compensation behaviour of the industry. A junior that gets hired and grows does not get a raise in their salary to the market rate, the only way for them to get the compensation commensurate with their new skills is to leave and get hired somewhere else. Companies can avoid this problem by not doing this.

[pydry]

thats kind of my point. if theyre going to subsidize a junior being trained and then pay market rate at the end why not just avoid the subsidy bit and poach somebody else's pretrained junior?

It's kind of a tragedy of the commons effect except the "tragedy" is for tech employers - who are stroppy coz other companies dont have to provide their workers with a free sushi bar so why should they????