The Senior Shortcut

Camille Fournier
5 min readOct 11, 2024

Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore. And indeed, I was at a dinner of director+-level engineering leaders recently where many said they had turned all of their hiring to solely focus on “senior engineers” in lieu of anyone else.

Anyone who has thought about this for a moment sees the obvious problems. How do people ever become “senior engineers” if they don’t start out as junior ones?

One possible answer can be found by observing a recent terminology shift in the way we talk about engineers. During the last 5 years I got away from differentiating between engineers by “senior” or “junior” and started referring to the latter as “early career.” Call it excessive wokeness, perhaps, but in a time when people were moving into tech from other professions, calling everyone who was just starting out in engineering “junior” felt awkward and wrong. Since everyone has to go through “early career” at some point, perhaps the answer is not that we aren’t hiring early career so much as we expect those folks to be more skilled, senior, independent from the jump? Better get busy with those side projects and internships, college students! Of course, why would we ever hire interns if we aren’t even hiring new grads?

But people mean more than skills when they talk about hiring only senior engineers; many times they also want independence of work habits, and the judgement that comes from having experienced different successes and failures. That is much harder to shortcut. I have seen many college students come through my teams over my career, and even ones with extremely strong programming skills and good work experience were rarely capable of reaching their potential without mentoring and management, and usually lacked the ability to reliably differentiate between ideas that sounded good but wouldn’t work in the context of the team/company/technology, and ideas that were a good fit given these constraints.

We could leave all of the training of early career people to big companies; they may be hiring fewer early career engineers but they’re still hiring them, and big companies have always been a good place for engineers to cut their teeth. But here I would argue we get to a different problem. As my friend Shanti said on twitter:

Seniority isn’t a particular space, it’s just a label for what the particular organization values. Many Senior engineers are products of the incentive structures of their orgs, and part of that is, unfortunately, calcified Opinions.

When you leave all training of early career engineers to big companies, you’re going to get a lot of big company Opinions coming out. One of the nice things about senior engineers trained at smaller companies and startups is that they are comfortable in ambiguity, they are comfortable in a mess, and they don’t necessarily bring quite as many Opinions, having been exposed to more varied technology in their formative years. I would guess that most startups want senior engineers who are not only technically solid and independent, but capable of adapting to the environment, and the best training for that comes from startups. You don’t absolutely have to work your early career in startups to have this flexibility (after all, I spent my early career in finance and managed to stay flexible enough), but it certainly helps.

At this stage of my career, I recognize that I define “senior” somewhat more strictly than many people. When I talk about senior hiring, I am not talking about people with 3–7 years of experience who can be trusted to write good code independently and own projects; I’m thinking about the people who can act as the technical leaders for that group. And if this is what you are hoping to hire, those magic 10Xers who can really take on the nasty projects and untangle them for you, I have bad news about relying on external senior hiring to do the job. Because the more senior you are hiring, the higher the likelihood that they will be quite brilliant but incapable of adapting to the culture of your company and engineering team enough to do the non-technical work that has to happen for these types of projects to succeed.

However, if you hire strong early career engineers, some percentage of them will turn out to have the potential to become those 10Xers. If you can retain them over time, they will grow to lead the game-changing initiatives of your company, being both technically capable and fully embedded in your company’s culture. Those years growing up with you give them an internal network and high baseline of trust that is so critical for success when you’re talking about big technology projects. Sure, not every early career hire will turn out this way: many will leave within the first three years, some that never found their footing, and others that were great but itchy to try new things. But I’ve yet to see a perfect shortcut; you’re going to hire the wrong people whether you hire only junior or only senior, and you’re inevitably going to lose some of the right ones either way.

If you’re thinking about the long game, and hoping to build a company that will last, you probably want to invest in at least some early career hiring during periods of growth. The truth is we’re in a prisoner’s dilemma here; you can try to be the company that defects and wins because of it, but if too many of us defect, we’re all going to pay. Given the uncertain nature of what you “win” by only hiring senior people in the first place, I would question the value of this bet. If you are working in a niche area, with a very small company that you expect to remain small, go nuts: hire and fire senior people until you get the right mix. But if you have aspirations to not just build a company, but to grow to a point where you can influence the industry, you may want to reconsider your all-senior stance. Don’t underestimate the value early career engineers can bring to a team; unless we’re a dying profession, their continued existance and success is the basis for our future.

PS: If you are hoping to hire only senior people so you can avoid having to manage them, you’re delusional. Enjoy your house of cards and pray there are no stiff breezes in your future.

Enjoy this post? You might like my books: The Manager’s Path, available on Amazon and Safari Online, and Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders, available now as ebook and shipping physical copies in November!

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