from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

As someone who hired many interns & entry-level engineers, 7 thoughts on this problem (thread) 1. Hiring juniors without someone to mentor them is a recipe for disaster: for the junior, the team, the company. Yes, they “get a chance”. And often burn out badly. Don’t do it. t.co/8ua1uLkNNZ

2. All companies with a decent eng culture put “ratios” in-place: no more than 2 or 3 non-senior engineers for every senior. This is to ensure those folks get mentorship. At Uber, we had a 1:4-1:2 ratio, depending on teams/charters. Higher for platform, lower for program.

3. Hiring for junior roles is 10x easier for any company than senior ones. You usually don’t have to even post the ad beyond your company site, and you certainly don’t need to pay to promote it. You get tons of interest. Explains why you see few jr positions on job board.

4. Hiring for juniors through job adverts is not super efficient for the company though. It’s very noisy. Many companies instead go directly to “the source” and hire directly from colleges (uni recruiting) or partner with bootcamps (eg Amazon and @LambdaSchool).

5. Referrals. Most companies have internal referral programs that pay employees $$ to refer qualified people. Guess which jobs get most referrals? Yep: junior positions. Referrals always have priority vs external applications. I’ve seen 10 internal referrals for 1 position!

6. Attrition and backfilling. When you hire senior and a mid-level, which one is more likely to leave? 95% of the time the mid-level. Especially because the junior often sticks around for that first promotion to mid-level. Now you need to backfill: you do so for a mid-level.

6. (Cont’d) this is another reason you see more job adverts for mid-level and senior folks: they leave far more often than junior ones. And need to be back filled. If a junior doesn’t leave… nothing to backfill.

7. Summing it up: - You need seniors with juniors - Many companies hire juniors straight from “the source” (uni/bootcamp) - Companies don’t need to pay to advertise the jr positions on job boards - So you see senior positions on these boards! Takeway:

Takeaway: it’s friggin’ hard to get that first/second job as a junior. I had a university degree, won Microsoft Imagine Cup, had 2 years experience, and at one point thought I won’t get a job in the UK when I moved there in 2009. The upshot: it gets *so* much better later.

Final note on something counter-intuitive. AmazingStartup just raised $5M and needs to hire 10 engineers to build ImportantProduct. How many juniors do they hire? For the first few hires: definitely seniors. They got budget to *make sure* they ship. Only after come juniors.

An interesting stat: in 2019, at Uber, the ratio of engineers was something like this: - Around 20% ish intern & eng 1 (junior) - 40% ish eng 2 (mid-level) - 30% ish senior - 10% ish above senior (Sr 2, staff etc) I rarely see above 30% junior ratios at tech companies.