[patch_dev]

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

[p1necone]

Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.

Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.

[anthuswilliams]

I'd also add that top-heavy engineering organizations are sometimes incapable of delivering anything useful because everyone wants to work on the hard problems, establish the frameworks, define the processes, and so on, and no one wants to operate the damn business. It's good to have a mix of perspectives in a team.

[Atotalnoob]

I 100% agree.

I’ve only had 1-2 juniors who “didn’t get any better” compared to the scores of senior engineers I wouldn’t trust to anything on their own.

Most juniors with investment from the organization and senior engineers will become competent quickly. That will eventually free up seniors.

[patch_dev]

Fully agree actually. Not sure its a counterpoint at all really, but its a great point. My comment wasn't intended to be "juniors were never worth it", but instead "juniors WERE worth it before but not because they produced amazing ROI themselves, why does the introduction of an LLM change that?" I'm solidly against the narrative that now all of a sudden juniors aren't worth hiring anymore because a senior with an LLM = 100x engineer.

[asdfman123]

> hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI

Yes, exactly. It's been a problem for a while, and it's worse now.

I'm worried it will go from "it's hard for juniors" to "it's nearly impossible for juniors."

[an0malous]

People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years