Your company needs Junior devs

Getting coffee with a bunch of local tech leaders, I surprised myself with how stridently I argued why companies should hire junior engineers.

Lately, BigTech only wants elite squads of Staff devs that can “hit the ground running” on the big (often AI) initiative. It’s been remarked (over and over) that AI will completely replace junior developers. Juniors, after all, exist to do “code monkey” work, easily replaced with an LLM.

However, that misses the mark on why we have junior employees. Coaching junior employees becomes its own force multiplier for innovating at scale. It’s not about the added labor, it’s about a psychologically safe culture that values teaching and learning, and the innovation that this unlocks.

Junior Talent forces your team to teach, coach, collaborate

What does it say about an organization that “ships”, but doesn’t collaborate?

In their article The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi argue that Japanese companies out innovated Western counterparts in the 80s/90s because of their focus on knowledge:

few managers grasp the true nature of the knowledge-creating company—let alone know how to manage it. The reason: They misunderstand what knowledge is and what companies must do to exploit it.

Western companies, they argue, see the “assembly line” of a knowledge firm. They see the outputs: KPIs, OKRs, Quarterly results. If you only think in terms of the assembly line, you will only seek units of input that increase those outputs (ie expert employees that ‘hit the ground running’ to churn out higher metrics).

However, as Nonaka and Takeuchi remark:

Making personal knowledge available to others is the central activity of the knowledge-creating company.

Innovative companies prioritize teaching, spreading, sharing knowledge. Ingraining knowledge into the company’s DNA matters more than a single developer shipping that next brilliant new feature.

Further, it turns out – knowledge discovery IS innovation.

Teaching helps not just the juniors, but the seniors too. The “Protege effect” is a well studied phenomenon where the teacher’s knowledge deepens when required to teach. Juniors force-multiply seniors, not by writing code, but just by forcing seniors to teach and rethink their knowledge.

Redundancy - overlap in focus area - undergirds this whole process. Again from Nonaka and Takeuchi:

Redundancy is important because it encourages frequent dialogue and communication. This helps create a “common cognitive ground” among employees and thus facilitates the transfer of tacit knowledge

Juniors become this redundancy. They absorb company tribal knowledge, reprocess it, internalize it, translate it to explicit knowledge. It helps seniors become aware of their assumptions, question them, refine them. To act as a Socratic dialog to ensure you’re actually on the right path. Such redundancy extends beyond innovating, to the simple team needs of fixing bugs and being on-call at 3AM so your senior devs don’t collapse from burnout.

Generalists innovate better than specialists

As argued in the book Range - generalists often bring innovative ideas to the table. The Wright Brothers are a classic example of non-expert, tinkering bicycle mechanics that end up inventing a flying machine. NoSQL databases come from distributed systems tinkerers, not relational database experts.

Junior employees come prepared with that Socratic dialog: to ask dumb questions and seek their answers. Often, it turns out, experts – through ego or blindness - don’t see obvious solutions. They don’t question tacit assumptions. Juniors on the other hand eagerly crash into, and sometimes through, problems seniors have convinced themselves are too hard. Juniors try “dumb” things that often fail, but sometimes show how blinded experts have become from their long held assumptions.

Some of the great ideas come from junior employees:

• Jack Dorsey had the idea for Twitter as a junior employee of a podcast company
• Post-it notes were invented by junior employees Spencer Silver and Art Fry at 3M
• Firefox was a side project of Blake Ross while working at Netscape

Juniors come from more diverse backgrounds than seniors (in every sense of the word). Leading to ways of thinking and perspectives that seniors totally miss.

Juniors mean psychological safety means more innovation

The term psychological safety in organizational literature stems from a 1999 paper by Amy Edmonson

The fundamental quote, in the abstract:

Team psychological safety is associated with learning behavior, team efficacy is not

(efficacy == perceived competence)

Creating environments where coaching is the norm, lead to increased psychological safety. Team members readily admit mistakes, and report errors.

In short, cultures of learning beget psychological safety. Psychological safety begets learning. Learning and innovation go hand in hand.

This is somewhat in contrast to group cohesiveness, a tightly related long-term group of colleagues. Such cohesiveness can:

reduce willingness to disagree and challenge others’ views, such as in the phenomenon of groupthink, implying a lack of interpersonal risk taking.

A stable team of long-term colleagues falls into groupthink and loses some ability to innovate. They sometimes form an immune system to outside ideas and experience. Onboarding anyone, especially juniors may seem like an annoying chore, as the colleagues don’t enjoy teaching and learning. We’ve all met that entrenched employee living in their knowledge silo, not excited to open their work up to others. They lose that “learning behavior” muscle.

“Learning behaviors”, crucially, include the ability to experiment - something I hear endlessly that more teams wish they had. This translates trying new approaches, running more A/B tests, being willing to try product directions that don’t work out (but sometimes do). Founders often talk about “failing fast”, but founders/managers/etc can also be their own worse enemy: wanting only the experts who already have all the answers, rather that juniors hungry to find new answers.

Your org suffers from not hiring juniors

Many of these themes begin to overlap: hire juniors that want to learn. Hire seniors that want to teach. Those who can’t teach, maybe shouldn’t be allowed to “do”.

I see a team much like a health University research lab. The platonic idea senior is open-minded and eager to be challenged. Eager to unlearn their expertise to find a new path. Along with juniors who come in enthusiastic to absorb knowledge like a sponge, asking naive questions that draw out new ideas and shake foundations.

That’s what it feels like to be on a high-performing team. Individuals open to ideas, eager to share credit, and avoid blame. Shipping constantly, sharing wins and learnings, and believing in the team.

Or at least, in my opinion, that’s 50% of the puzzle. The other 50% requires an interface to the “outside world” that protects this team, sells its internal chaos as a cohesive narrative, and works with investors and stakeholders to translate messy experiments into a glorious tale of progress. Sadly, many executives mistake this outer chrome of leadership for the entire system, ignoring the internal combustion engine of teaching and learning that makes it run.

If this isn’t your culture, I’m glad to grab a coffee to talk about what I’ve seen (and where I’ve failed!)