> I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.

I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspective.

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion.

Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.

- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).

- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.

>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

That's how companies fail.

It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.

Completely misses the point of training someone

This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right?

Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k