Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Death of a Junior

Hot topic these days during the rise of the AI era is that no one is hiring junior engineers; not that many have hired inexperienced people in the past - what we are now witnessing is junior apocalypse. At the same time, we are scared there will be a lack of senior engineers in the near future and yet we persevere on the path of making it so.

The Event

The new VP of Engineering has arrived in our country to meet our team of 50 mostly seasoned and industry veteran engineers: software developers, QA specialists, DevSecOps crew, and a couple of engineering leads. As a remote-first team, we rented a conference room in a local hotel and prepared a couple of slides to introduce ourselves. Standard stuff: how we came to be, team values we believe in, products we own and pride ourselves with.

During the introductory talk we received a question from our new VP: what is the seniority breakdown of the team? Only a natural question considering majority of the people were relatively young, in their 30s, 40s and a handful in their 20s and 50s. We anticipated a slide for such a question and explained we only have three or four junior-grade engineers while everyone else is a stand-alone engineer, a senior, or an architect.

Basic assumption of an experienced leader would be that we hired people of various seniorities based on the business and team needs. This is why I decided it was time for a little stunt and asked the following:

"Who here did we hire as a Junior Engineer, raise your hand."

48 hands went up in the air.

People looked around the conference room, smiled and laughed as not all of them knew this fact. This moment was worth more than a dozen team building sessions. Everyone was proud to be a part of this team. It was also one of the proudest moments of my career.

VP looked impressed, but I cannot say that he agreed with the way we built up our team. We received a hard stop on hiring junior engineers with a clarification that hiring experienced talent will bring new insight and thinking from the outside.

This all happened a few years before the AI hype.

The Promise of a Junior

As an engineering leader with 1000s of resumes read, 100s of candidate interviews, and over 100 hires under my belt I still strongly believe that hiring junior candidates who are a solid values-fit and have a healthy motivation outweighs the benefits of getting experienced candidates with strong hard-skills who may not be as good of a values-fit.

Hiring values-first without requiring previous suitable working experience is statistically more beneficial as there are many more inexperienced candidates with values similar to what we are looking for than candidates who are a combination of values-fit and actual hands-on experience.

Downside of hiring inexperienced candidates is that we need to give them a runway before they can take off. This is where values and a good mentorship program come in as they can size the runway to fit an aircraft carrier.

The biggest upside of hiring from the streets is high loyalty factor. When building a sustainable business it allows for a low attrition and low hiring overhead. It can also be budget-friendly but that is a different topic.

Not all juniors are people who are looking for their first job. We've had multiple new engineers who were embarking on a career-changing journey with us after years of service in another industry: former military, a lawyer, a travel agent, a furniture factory worker, foreign language teachers, construction workers, car mechanics, a DJ, and more. We've had a few "juniors" who had children of the same age as their recently graduated junior teammates.

All those junior engineers were able to grow through increasingly more difficult tasks while contributing to the company. Challenge brought to us now by the widely available AI software development assistants is that the junior-grade work is non-existent.

Do we stop onboarding juniors altogether or do we modify the initial junior-grade tasks complexity to accommodate for the fact that they too will be using the AI assistants at their disposal from day one? I'm a strong proponent of the latter.

We had our fair share of failed takeoffs when it comes to junior engineers and are grateful that the trial period exists in the first place. When we onboard at an entry-grade with a strong mentoring system there are only two outcomes - however both are desirable, win-win scenarios:

• The engineer takes off from a short runway and becomes a perspective, sustainable, loyal contributor able to grow inside the company
• The engineer simply doesn't work out during the trial run; this is failing-fast from the company perspective while the candidate still gained initial professional experience

The Hire

This time we had to comply with the VP request and hire at a higher grade. We were time-boxed so we found a partial values-fit candidate with solid hard skills and suitable previous experience.

A two-week sprint was coming to an end and all team members were scrambling to wrap up the deliverables by the time of the demo session. The new experienced hire was confident throughout the sprint, there were no obstacles during daily standups, work was progressing on schedule.

We went around to prepare the demo and finally got to the new experienced hire: "I have nothing to show. It isn't done." Perplexed as we were, we had to ask why. "The electricity went out so I couldn't complete the work." When we asked to review the code and help out, he had absolutely nothing to show. I kid you not: a dog ate his homework. 😕