Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from?

[jimt]

At a prior job, I'd lobbied to hire more junior people. It was an extremely small team of senior guys and we actually needed junior people.

The rationale from management (as best as I understood it) was that the senior people need less direction and can work faster and be more productive. So you can hire 1 senior person and get more work out of them than 2 junior people, in addition to the fact that they can do more things than 2 junior people can.

The problem was that they wanted the senior guys to be constantly fixing bugs, nuisances, tracking down obscure issues in old crappy code, and other piddly stuff. Important stuff, mind you, but usually not the sort of thing that senior guys like to do. You reach a point where you feel like a senior developer and you want to do senior level things (mentoring new people, leading projects, building software (instead of just patching it) and so on) and trying to shoehorn those people into junior roles wasn't good.

So my plan was to bring on junior people and give them all the little irritating things to do. The senior guys give them direction and training and get to work on bigger projects, and the junior guys get exposure and training. The senior guys spend some portion of their time mentoring the junior people, reviewing their work, and helping them out, but the work's actually getting done. The rest of their time, they're working on bigger projects. I think it's a net-win, because otherwise they tend to spend time procrastinating the piddly little things that "aren't fun".

Long term, the junior guys advance to become mid-level and senior guys. You bring on more junior people to go under them. Or the original senior guys leave to go onto bigger and better things and the original junior guys step up into their position.

You end up with a developer factory. You give people a way to advance their skillset and careers (hopefully moving the seniorest senior guys into more team or project lead roles (or whatever)), you get more work done, and everyone can see the utility. It's not just advanced people spinning their wheels doing things they already knew how to do before they started.

That's my theory, at least. Alas, I could never convince anyone above me to try putting it into practice.

[jdtoronto]

I have some sympathy with you here jimt.

Although I have been largely self-employed for nearly 30 years, I did spend a couple of years working as a Senior Design Engineer with a microwave communications company (that is really my love but jobs dont pay so well) in 1998-9. While there I suppose my time was 20-25% administration, co-ordination and technical writing, 50% design and the balance spent essentially mentoring the junior guys. The latter was possibly the most rewarding part of the job and actually helped the entire project run much more smoothly.

In the 50% I spent doing design work I could still outproduce 2 juniors - and do it with fewer redesigns, but that isn't the real point. By the time the project moved to production I had three good juniors who had been well apprenticed and in fact all of them were ready to move up a good level. So in fact after that we split the two seniors - each taking a new project. I took two of the juniors, the other senior took one and we hired three new juniors across the two jobs. I left shortly afterwards to migrate to Canada and one of my old juniors quite capably stepped into my position. Funniest thing is that I still have contact with these folk, and the same team is still together, sans me, and the owner of the company credits my "apprentice" system for building a really strong team and they still use the same process today. Net result, since 1999 two people left, me to immigrate and one guy went to England with his fiance, but he ended up going back! Over that period the team has grown from 5 to 18 staff, the original three juniors are now the three most senior staff.

The moral? Don't give seniors the scutt work - they don't like it. Let them mentor the juniors and they will all like it. Let them pass on the benefit of their experience and, at least in that case, everybody was a winner.

jdtoronto