GoKawiilThe Kids Are Alright
Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
I was listening to a podcast recently where the interviewer asked the CTO of a very large tech company if they were still hiring junior engineers. I cannot get over the fact this was a serious question.
We are certainly still going through the fog of change with AI in software engineering. Companies are experimenting, with some making big claims and most feeling behind in adapting. This anxiety leads to simplistic arguments and decisions (hello tokenmaxxing!) as companies try to find simple bets that they hope will put them ahead of the curve.
“Should we hire junior engineers?” is one of those questions. New entrants are facing a real struggle, with lower growth in tech and tooling that can complete the tasks they would perform. I don’t want to minimize that. But this framing is damaging to the candidates and, more importantly, to companies.
Junior engineers are needed today and will continue to be needed. If your organization has doubts about that, you might be facing a different problem.
This is not a new topic
The motivation to avoid hiring less tenured engineers is not new. Tech companies have for a long time aimed at hiring only more tenured employees, on the theory that individuals need to own their work end to end, making it better to invest in experience.
This was the situation in a company I worked at. As I joined, the policy was to only hire senior engineers and above. The argument was that due to the complexity of our system, junior engineers could be a liability, shipping changes that broke things. One of the visible and ironic consequences of this decision was the struggle that managers would face to get simple tasks done, since everyone felt they were above them.
We changed the policy, first by experimenting with hiring a few less tenured people, and then by setting up an intern program that became an entry point for graduates. A few years later, some of those interns were mid-level engineers outperforming people we had hired as seniors.
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