> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience,

If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.

They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.

Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.

Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company.

Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.

Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers?

This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.

How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.

Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired.

Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.

Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.

Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.

boomers wish