Comment by mschuster91
Comment by mschuster91 3 days ago
> Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role.
Capex vs opex, that's the fundamental problem at heart. It "looks better on the numbers" to have recruiting costs than to have to set aside a senior developer plus paying the junior for a few months. That is why everyone and their dog only wants to hire seniors, because they have the skillset and experience that you can sit their ass in front of any random semi fossil project and they'll figure it out on their own.
If the stonk analysts would go and actually dive deep into the numbers to look at hiring side costs (like headhunter expenses, employee retention and the likes), you'd see a course change pretty fast... but this kind of in-depth analysis, that's only being done by a fair few short-sellers who focus on struggling companies and not big tech.
In the end, it's a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It's fine if a few companies do that, it's fine if a lot of companies do that... but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones), suddenly society as a whole has a real and massive problem.
Our societies are driven into a concrete wall at full speed by the financialization of every tiny aspect of our lives. All that matters these days are the gods of the stonk market - screw the economy, screw the environment, screw labor laws, all that matters is appearing "numbers go up" on the next quarterly.
> but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones)
Can we stop pretending that we don't know how to solve this problem? If you hire juniors at $X/year, but they keep getting poached after 2-3 years because now they can get $X*1.5/year (or more!), then maybe you should start promoting and giving raises to them after they've gotten a couple years experience.
Seriously, this is not a hard problem to solve. If the junior has proven themselves, give them the raise they deserve instead of being all Surprised Pikachu when another company is willing to pay them what they've proven themselves worthy of.