Here is the question:
When hiring, you often have a choice between a more junior person who may not have all the required experience but for whom the job will be an exciting challenge, and a more senior person who certainly has the skills but who won’t be as challenged by the role. I’ve seen success over the years with both approaches. Do you have a bias for one or the other? Or it depends? On what?
Well I guess it depends on why the role needs to be filled. Sometimes a role exists because there is a lot of work to be done, if this is the case, how fast will the junior get up to speed? If the answer is ‘fast enough’ then maybe. If this is the case, then could be an advantage for the company and they should look at the pros and cons between hiring the senior and the junior. While it may be on a per company basis and per candidate basis, here is what I believe are the pros and cons (generally speaking) for hiring:
Junior:
- Pros
- You can justify a lower salary
- They may be eager to learn and put in some extra hours
- Cons
- It’ll take longer to get up to speed
- It’ll take more of the other developers time meaning, the productivity of the development team will drop
- May not have the confidence to add to the product development discussions
Senior:
- Pros
- They will get up to speed faster
- May be able to get by without taking anybody’s time
- Will be more inclined to add to the discussions surrounding the product development
- Cons
- Their salary will be higher
In my opinion, the reality is, that the only reason a company needs to fill a role is because they need to increase productivity. What will the role require? Is it to delegate some of the more simpler easier development tasks to somebody else? Is it to fill a role which used to be filled by another developer (junior, mid-level or senior) who has left the company? Or is the work going to be ‘high level’ and they need someone who needs to be able to keep up with the other developers on the team (all of whom are mid-senior level)?
And back to the original question, just because the senior wouldn’t feel challenged, doesn’t mean that he is of less value to the company. The only thing I can see it being a problem is that the senior may decide to leave the company sooner than the junior would. But before then, how much more productivity would that senior have brought to the company during his or her time there (when being compared with the junior developer)?
In fact, once the junior gains more experience then it’s possible that he or she will no longer feel challenged as well. And in some ways, are more likely to leave the company earlier because, moving jobs from junior to a mid-level (or even senior) developer will yield a greater salary increase, than if a senior changes roles, as the senior could already be at the top end of the salary ceiling of their specialty (or near it). Also the senior could’ve already moved from job to job when he or she were a junior themselves, and therefore more likely to ‘settle down’ with the company they’re in.
Conclusion
I appreciate and understand why the person might ask the question or start a debate on the topic. Although, in my opinion, the only reason to consider a junior is either, the company has a lower budget than the senior developer market rate. Or it may be that the role simply can’t be filled due to the product or technology they’re using perhaps i.e. legacy code or technology that no one else is using.
If they have a budget for a senior developer, then in my opinion, they should just hire a senior developer, there is no benefit to hiring somebody who will return less productivity than the other.