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aerhardtyesterday at 7:51 PM1 replyview on HN

I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.


Replies

lingrush4yesterday at 9:25 PM

In my experience, juniors are absolutely terrified of asking any sort of question at all during a meeting. Senior engineers are far more likely to ask interesting, useful questions.

We hire juniors so that we can offload easy but time-consuming work on them while we focus on more important or more difficult problems. We also expect that juniors will eventually gain the skills to solve the more difficult problems as a result of the experience they gain performing the easy tasks.

If we stop hiring juniors now, then we won't have any good senior engineers in 5-10 years.