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If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

111 points by milkglass

by lukeify

5 subcomments

> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like.
Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another 3 months (New Zealand).
Both the employer and employee know this. So the employee is either foolish or risky enough for asking and gets turned down, or they do actually leave and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.
End of story.

by lordnacho

2 subcomments

I was wondering if there's anything behind the idea that people who learned how to code before AI will become the human capital version of low-background steel.
Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.

by nfriedly

0 subcomment

> You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.
I think I see the problem here.

by troglodytetrain

4 subcomments

Senior engineers have always owned the application (by knowledge not by law). And that has never been a problem. The real problem is, that without new Juniors there will never be new Seniors, and your company will collapse when your Seniors retire.

by kykat

1 subcomments

I say that we should fully support all AI initiatives and stop giving advice. Tell them AI will make them rich and that they won't have to care about anybody, and just wait to see what happens.

by hermitShell

1 subcomments

This article touches on an extreme case "what if all your Sr. Engineers are financially independent?" but I think could do more to explore real world examples and address the elephant in the room, compensation through vested shares. I'm not personally experienced about that kind of thing, but I can imagine it helps maintain a healthier balance of power.
Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer who can monopolize information and has gained authoritative understanding of the design can be crazy powerful, for better or for worse. If this agent optimizes for good salary, lowish effort and high stability... yes I can imagine a senior engineer who fits the name in rate of technical output, not only pecking order order.

by flowerthoughts

0 subcomment

1. This is already the situation if you don't have technical knowledge in-house and outsource all development.
2. Yes, if you only have few people who know how to use a powerful tool, they might have leverage.
3. The supply-demand mechanism is certainly there, but the time scale is never mentioned. It'll take time to remove the unemployed juniors from the pool (maybe they get sucked up into other jobs.) It'll take time for seniors to realize they have leverage. And, of course, the company must not have rehired junior engineers for other reasons (e.g. because the coding tools become so good that seniors are not needed.)
Any objections about "this thesis isn't true; look around you" needs to take this into account. The argument is not that we're there now, but that there's a mechanism to lead there.

by georgeburdell

0 subcomment

The missing ending to this article is when companies whine for more immigration because they didn’t invest in the future to make sure a talent pipeline still existed locally.

by bitwize

0 subcomment

There's an easy solution for this:
1. Declare AI "the future" and mandate its use by all employees.
2. Hire college grads who have no idea how to code without AI.
3. Start PIPing problem seniors for not being "AI-first" enough. Great way to mask the ageism you are doubtless committing.

by crazygringo

1 subcomments

> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like.
Right... the alternative is to let the senior engineer go, some work gets reshuffled a bit between other senior engineers, and lowest-priority work is delayed until they hire a new senior engineer.
It's not that the company is held hostage by the senior engineer, sheesh.
> you don’t have options. You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.
Huh? A replacement engineer is "probably" even more than 140% of what you're currently paying? Then your company has a whole other problem which is that it is criminally underpaying its engineers.
Nothing about this post makes any sense. It's not how companies, employees, or the labor market work.

by peteforde

5 subcomments

If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it.
It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value.
The entitlement is baked deep into the mindset that there are people who work and people who profit.

by awesome_dude

0 subcomment

There's always been a reluctance by business to hire juniors, AI is just the latest excuse.

by taurath

0 subcomment

I’d love to go work at one of this small and medium shuttering businesses. How does one do that?

by yarekt

1 subcomments

except Juniors with Claude are now “seniors”.
In all seriousness even though deep down I know there’s no replacement for experience, I’ve seen a bunch of new people get impressively far with just hacking stuff together. And in the end if you’re making money with that for a long time, isn’t that all that matters to the companies?

by throw_m239339

1 subcomments

IMHO, What is likely to happen is that eventually businesses will just "hire" agents from a handful of AI providers directly, trained by... guess who..., each time you prompt Codex, Claude or whatever, you are also training these services while paying for them... If Seniors think that their jobs are safe, lmao...

by colordrops

1 subcomments

This article is written from the perspective of a corporations's best interests.
Large companies have made it abundantly clear that they are sociopathic entities that consider nothing but profit. They will put on a mask and smile and do the absolute minimum to appear to care about you and retain valuable employees but it's all a show.
It is within the best interests of individual engineers to do the same.

by magicstefanos

0 subcomment

...good!

by throw-the-towel

1 subcomments

> Eventually this turns into a comp conversation. A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,”...
...and the company says "fine, we'll replace you with AI / wanted a layoff anyway".