There are many reasons to consider hiring inexperienced software engineers into your team, beyond the commonly discussed factors of cost and social responsibility.
Hire to maximise team effectiveness; not to maximise team size. Adding more people increases the communication and synchronisation overhead in the team. Growing a team has rapidly diminishing returns.
However, adding the right people, perspectives, skills, and knowledge into a team can transform that team’s impact. Instantly unblocking problems that would have taken days of research. Resolving debates that would have paralysed. The right balance between planning and action.
It’s easy to undervalue inexperienced software engineers as part of a healthy team mix. While teams made up of entirely senior software engineers can be highly effective. There are many benefits beyond cost and social responsibility for hiring entry level and junior software engineers onto your team.
Fresh Perspectives
Experienced engineers have learned lots of so called “best practices” or dogma. Mostly these are good habits that are safer ways of working, save time, and aid learning. On the other hand sometimes the context has changed and these practices are no longer useful, but we carry on doing them anyway out of habit. Sometimes there’s a better way, now that tech has moved on, and we haven’t even stopped to consider.
There’s a lot of value in having people on the team who’ve yet to develop the same biases. People who’ll force you to think through and articulate why you do the things you’ve come to take for granted. The reflection may help you spot a better way.
To take advantage you need sufficient psychological safety that anyone can ask a question without fear of ridicule. This also benefits everyone.
Incentive for Simplicity and Safety
A team of experienced engineers may be able to tolerate a certain amount of accidental code complexity. Their expertise may enable them to work relatively safely without good test safety nets and gaps in their monitoring. I’m sure you know better ;)
Needing to make our code simple enough to understand for a new software engineer to be able to understand and change it exerts positive pressure on our code quality.
Having to make it safe to fail. Protecting everyone on the team from being able to make a change that takes down production or corrupts data helps us all. We’re all human.
Don’t have any junior engineers? What would you do differently if you knew someone new to programming was joining your team next week? Which of those things should you be doing anyway? How many would pay back their investment even with experienced engineers? How much risk and complexity are you tolerating? What’s its cost?
Growth opportunity for others
Teaching, advising, mentoring, coaching less experienced people on the team can be a good development opportunity for others. Teaching helps deepen your own understanding of a topic. Practising your ability to lift others up will serve you well.
Level up fast
It can be humbling how swiftly new developers can get up to speed and become highly productive. Particularly in an environment that really values learning. Pair programming can be a tremendous accelerator for learning through doing. True pairing, i.e. solving problems together, rather than spoonfeeding or observing.
Tenure
Amount of software engineering experience is one indicator for the impact an individual can have. Amount of experience within your organisation is also relevant. If you only hire senior people and your org is not growing fast enough to provide them with further career development opportunities they are more likely to leave to find growth opportunities. It can be easier to find growth opportunities for people earlier in their career.
A mix of seniorities can help increase the average tenure of developers in your organisation—assuming you will indeed support them with their career development.
Action over Analysis
Junior engineers often bring a healthy bias towards getting on with doing things over excessive analysis. Senior engineers sometimes get stuck evaluating foreseen possibilities, finding “the best tool for the job”, or debating minutiae ad nauseam. Balancing the desires to do the right things right, with the desire to do something, anything quickly on a team can be transformational.
Hire Faster
There’s more inexperienced people. It’s quicker to find people if we relax our experience and skill requirements. Some underrepresented minorities may be less underrepresented at more junior levels.
The inexperienced engineer you hire today could be the senior engineer you need in years to come.
To ponder
What other reasons have I missed? In what contexts is the opposite true? When would you only hire senior engineers?