Your company needs Junior devs
Getting coffee with a bunch of local tech leaders, I surprised myself with how stridently I argued why companies should hire junior engineers.
Lately, BigTech only wants elite squads of Staff devs that can “hit the ground running” on the big (often AI) initiative. It’s been remarked (over and over) that AI will completely replace junior developers. Juniors, after all, exist to do “code monkey” work, easily replaced with an LLM.
However, that misses the mark on why we have junior employees. Coaching junior employees becomes its own force multiplier for innovating at scale. It’s not about the added labor, it’s about a psychologically safe culture that values teaching and learning, and the innovation that this unlocks.
In their article The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi argue that Japanese companies out innovated Western counterparts in the 80s/90s because of their focus on knowledge:
few managers grasp the true nature of the knowledge-creating company—let alone know how to manage it. The reason: They misunderstand what knowledge is and what companies must do to exploit it.
