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Discussion on: If you don't hire juniors, you don't deserve seniors

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Gabriel

"In most cases, a junior developer with six months of experience on a team will be more effective than a senior developer who just signed on, for no other reason than familiarity with the domain."

I just couldn't agree more. It just happened in my project, about 2 weeks ago: one of the seniors of my project, who had been working for two years, left. Management had this brilliant idea of replacing him with another senior from a different project.

It was a total failure. Not only he does not know anything from the project itself and he is as lost as a junior would be, but the bias he carries on from other projects makes him challenge things rather than learn them. He just hates it! Everything is different, and messy (as every project is, at some level).

Bottom line is: when we bring seniors to our project, way too often we have to confront them and their bias (e.g: PR reviews), whereas when it comes to junior devs, we can teach them, and, eventually, they excel.