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If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

• Dana224 5mo ago
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• Dana224 5mo ago
  For weeks now I have been in my partner's phone with the help of spyhackelite@ gmai1 c om hoping to see if my partner is cheating, I monitored his phone and found a chat. I went through the whole chats and also went through deleted chats only to find out that every Saturdays and Sundays my husband always go for morning jogging and he would text this particular girl to know if she's home, he would jog to her house just to f u c k her. I cried my eyes out because I love and care about him so much only for me to discover he is cheating on me, honestly I feel so heart broken.
• vanessafridman6 5mo ago
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• magicstefanos 5mo ago
  ...good!
• awesome_dude 5mo ago
  There's always been a reluctance by business to hire juniors, AI is just the latest excuse.
• throw-the-towel 5mo ago
  > 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".
  • awakeasleep 5mo ago
    Whats your background in the industry, where this seems plausible?
    • doublescoop 5mo ago
      As someone with 20 years in the industry, it seems absolutely plausible. Stupid, but entirely within the realm of possibility. The people making these calls have no loyalty to their company; they have loyalty to their own career. And if doing this is something that gives them a win and they can be gone by the time the consequences some around... it'll happen.
• colordrops 5mo ago
  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.
  • doctaj 5mo ago
    They don’t even care about profit! It’s well documented that having long-tenured employees saves you money in a ton of ways (the tangibles are: recruiter fees, ramp-up time, higher pay for new hires… and the intangibles are all the hidden work or keep things running smoothly, building relationships between teams or departments, and innovation). But individuals have to quit to get a market-rate job, and the company ends up paying out the nose for someone new.
    • anticensor 5mo ago
      They in fact care about control more than they care about profit. I mean control over non-shareholders, including employees and customers, as part of an implied goal of any organisation, control over non-members.
      • yarekt 5mo ago
        I would say it’s more short term profit. They are happy to cut off the nose and put the rest in the backlog
    • kykat 5mo ago
      It's all just a sado maso power game.
    • awesome_dude 5mo ago
      I saw an article on HN a while back that showed the math for "senior" employees was affected by the amount of profit generated off them. I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG. The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases. So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.
• peteforde 5mo ago
  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.
  • mettamage 5mo ago
    Often enough they don't care or realize it. I've seen all the data analysts that were eiter (1) senior or (2) also had data engineering skills leave. They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more. That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre. Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.
  • xyzelement 5mo ago
    This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?
    • catlover76 5mo ago
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    • miyoji 5mo ago
      I did, because private equity took over the plumbing company and raised the prices.
    • deleted 5mo ago
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    • 5mo ago
• throw_m239339 5mo ago
  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...
  • Buttons840 5mo ago
    If the knowledge work of Seniors is fully automated, wont pretty much all knowledge work be fully automated? Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app? One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.
    • xnx 5mo ago
      > so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck The remainder of the problems are caused by overly complex deployment/hosting setups. Compiling a binary from source looks like a breeze by comparison.
• troglodytetrain 5mo ago
  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.
  • Unmotivator2677 5mo ago
    I have seen this happen in some companies already. A slightly different scenario, the CEO actually wants to hire new juniors but seniors refuse to train them .
    • exabrial 5mo ago
      It happens cyclically. Sun Microsystems was a good example, Cerner was another (ironically both acquired by Oracle).
  • pdpi 5mo ago
    If this was a "your company" problem, it would sort itself out soon enough. The real concern is that it might a "your industry" problem.
  • ai-x 5mo ago
    The hypothesis is completely wrong. With AI, juniors can catch up with the codebase / domain must faster and deeper than before. It's just a matter of putting time.
  • dublinstats 5mo ago
    From another perspective, the problem is people entering the workforce without sufficient skills to be valuable to employers anymore. The solution would be to spend more time in training so you can reach senior level when you start. Software has been an anomaly among high-paying professions in the low bar for entry. Maybe that's ending.
• lukeify 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • awakeasleep 5mo ago
    Seems like you’re only imagining interchangeable people who dont have bargaining power?
    • lukeify 5mo ago
      That's probably the bulk of senior developers. We're not all inverting custom proprietary binary trees.
      • iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
        By the same logic, most CEOs are interchangeable. After all, not all of them are creating new markets, shepherding new and exciting business ventures or changing the way we do X.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • SR2Z 5mo ago
    > and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.
• kykat 5mo ago
  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.
  • yetihehe 5mo ago
    And remove all warning labels.
• nfriedly 5mo ago
  > 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.
• lordnacho 5mo ago
  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.
  • Grosvenor 5mo ago
    How do you value people who learnt to code in the 80's, 90's or 2000's today? Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
    • lordnacho 5mo ago
      > How do you value people who learnt to code in the 80's, 90's or 2000's today? Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature. > Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized? Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.
  • hermitShell 5mo ago
    I partially agree with this idea, but there will always be the Jeff Dean and Fabrice Bellard of the world... but 99% of companies won't ever get the chance to hire the top 1% of programmers. Therein is the problem. Maybe a better way to look at it is the statistical likelihood of producing good engineers and scientists goes down with AI because of poor fundamentals. In SW this is perhaps the easiest domain to counterpunch. Get young folks learning computer history and understanding how the hardware works down to a register level. We write most software with some mental abstraction of what the hardware is actually doing. That's the crux, I believe, and if we lose widespread hardware understanding then we truly do become lost at sea, practicing the mystic art of non deterministic incantations
• taurath 5mo ago
  I’d love to go work at one of this small and medium shuttering businesses. How does one do that?
• crazygringo 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • woeirua 5mo ago
    It’s not how companies work today, but it could be how companies operate in the future. Imagine a situation where single engineers manage a fleet of agents and own entire systems. This is already happening. If that engineer leaves then it’s game over for that system.
    • crazygringo 5mo ago
      It's a basic part of management that you never let any individual employee become irreplaceable. Remember, people get sick and go on vacation too. Managers are always supposed to make sure that tasks and responsibilities can be picked up by someone else. And the AI that is making it easier for engineers to handle so much more engineering, also makes it easier for a new engineer to take over. They literally just sit down and prompt the AI to start explaining how the current system is set up.
      • woeirua 5mo ago
        You would hope so, but yet… a lot of people are getting their teams to reap cost savings.
• bitwize 5mo ago
  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.
• hermitShell 5mo ago
  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.
  • bigfatkitten 5mo ago
    I worked in a company like this. The senior engineers, who built the main product that pays the bills have all been there for 25+ years. They held shares in the company back when it was worthless, and now they are all very wealthy. At this point, they literally show up to work just for fun and they aren’t shy about making this known. The result is that the company has massive insurance policies on these guys in case they die. They also call the shots; they have outsized influence over a range of functions they know absolutely nothing about, ranging from HR to finance to security.
• yarekt 5mo ago
  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?
  • ritcgab 5mo ago
    They aren't. They act like seniors. But that is all the business needs.
• georgeburdell 5mo ago
  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.
• flowerthoughts 5mo ago
  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.