The Hagakure #76: Why Are You Not Hiring Junior Developers?
I recently came across a LinkedIn post by John Crickett where he makes the point that not hiring junior developers is a mistake:
I agree. But I fear this is not going to get better. In fact, it’s probably just going to get worse.
Three reasons quickly come to mind.
Mistaking the Complicated for the Complex
Most founders and executives firmly believe building technology is complicated, not complex. Therefore, they seek experts (read: seniors) who “have done it before” (as if they had done it before here) and will therefore solve their problems. It almost never works, due to a number of questionable assumptions:
Software development is complex, not complicated. In part because it’s a team sport done by people (aka “snowflakes”) and in part because most of it has never really been done before. Not here anyway.
Complexity requires ability to learn and iterate, not just a recipe or mere technical expertise (which would work fine for complicated problems).
In this light, most seniors really are not really senior because learning happens at the team level. Many seniors are really strong individuals but they fail to level others up.
Unfortunately, when success doesn’t happen, the lesson leadership takes is often the wrong one: “we just didn't hire the right people,” or “they didn't care enough,” or “they didn’t work hard enough.”
Technical Complexity
Related to (1) above, as well as a lack of disciplined technical leadership, technical complexity explodes. Increasingly more time and resources are dedicated to building and maintaining infrastructure and other liabilities (as in: things that are not core business and creating customer value).
More to the point, as Joseph Emison points out in his book Serverless as a Game Changer, the more complicated your architecture is, the more cognitive load and the harder it is to truly be “full-stack”. In such an environment, you really can’t afford to hire juniors and you’re condemned to hire a lot of deep specialists.
“We ain’t got time to learn”
There’s simply so much stress and anxiety in the go go go startup mindset—especially in today's environment—that the idea of learning (and thus mentoring) takes increasingly more of a backseat. You’re expected to either come equipped with everything already, or to learn it on your own.
Operating momentum is everything and we thus worship at the altar of Execution. Even if we're executing towards a brick wall we can’t even see.
I sense this will get worse, not better, in the age of AI and LLMs. Writ large, the less we understand a technology, the more we will want to hire experts who (supposedly) do.
So, I fear the future does not bode well for junior, inexperienced folks. How will they acquire the experience if experience is the price of admission to begin with?
Caveat: of course there are exceptions. But in my experience they are precisely that: exceptions.