👇🏾
So a few quick thoughts about building engineering teams since I'm sitting on a bus anyway.
Everybody I talk to agrees on the problem. We are trading long term sustainability for short term delivery.
We don't hire junior devs because they're not going fast enough for us *today*. We're not thinking about speed tomorrow and next year.
We overload our senior engineers with all the work. But they burn out or they stop putting up with the bullshit because they don't have to.
Hence smaller teams, high turnover, and no investment in growing the next generation of devs.
We have to find a balance. We need balanced teams.
Once you establish how many senior to less senior devs, your next step is to address velocity vs burnout.
Your senior engineers cannot do 80% of the work and then spend another 80% of their time trying to mentor ppl.
Instead you reset expectations with senior ppl. Their *actual job* is to enable less senior ppl to do 80% of the work. By teaching them.
This has 2 problems that make people balk at the idea. 1) It does mean we will go slower today. There will be an initial hit to productivity.
It's an investment. There is always an initial cost to investments. But more importantly, the time and length of that hit is not clear to ppl.
That leads to the second problem. As a discipline, we are bad at teaching ppl. We cannot give confidence that we will train ppl up quickly.
Mentorship and training is a skill like any other. We don't teach ppl out to do it. We don't reward ppl for it. So why would ppl be good at it?
A subset of senior ppl get good at it because they enjoy it and they enjoy helping other ppl get better. They often get negative pushback for getting "distracted" by it.
We have to break this dynamic by changing the expectations of the business. We will get things done, but we will also train and grow ppl.
My one caveat to this is that it doesn't work at early stage startups. It's all about build or die. You can't invest in the future if you don't have a future.
But later stage startups have to start thinking more long term. And other kinds of tech businesses as well.
Anyway. I'm getting off the bus. Feel free to argue, but I might just go home and go to sleep. ✌🏾
