2024 · intermediate
Teach them well and let them lead the way
With apologies to Whitney Houston, I DO believe the juniors are our future! Many of the developers of my generation came up at a time where we were just bouncing around and learning through breaking things. We had permission to make mistakes, and we frequently worked through things with peers. Now that the industry has (somewhat) matured, there's a risk of taking some of that for granted. By default a "senior" !== "mentor." There's more to mentoring than just assigning tickets and tearing through code reviews. If you want your team to succeed, if you're averse to hiring junior developers, then examining whether or not you have proper "mentorship" is key. Teach people to swim, don't just toss them in the deep end and yell commands.