> Where are young developers less productive than their seniors? People are literally building successful companies on the fact that if you set up an university like environment, have foosball, tech-interest-talk and pizza nights, then you can hire a bunch of fresh developers who will work a lot of extra and free hours for you because they are young.
This myth comes up surprisingly often. I've never met a junior developer that could match my productivity as a senior developer. Not to say they're bad in any way, but I've got literally decades more experience in the tools and technologies they're just learning. Maybe they're willing to work longer hours, but they aren't being nearly as productive in those hours as a senior dev.
I agree with you completely. I'm a mid level right now and I can get 4x more work done than my junior can, and my senior can do 2x more work than me in a day.
I think you’re missing the key component of payment. They cost very little, and, they work extra hours for free. It’s not really a myth. Some of the most successful companies in my region is doing exactly this sort of thing. The quality isn’t as good, and your know-how leaves once they “grow up”, but it’s proving to be a really good business model.
Which from a management perspective can be explained as the following: In non tech you buy software and development time, and projects almost always fail to deliver on time or within budget regardless of which company you go with. At the same time, the biggest note on your budget is the upfront cost. Even if you end up spending more by going with these junior exploitative companies in the long run, it’s still easier to justify picking them when you’re talking up the latter, because they charge 3-40% less an hour.
On top of that there are different kinds of productivity. There’s the senior developer who does things right, but non-tech clients don’t give a shit about that, they just want something that works most of the time. Which again is more expensive in the long run, but nobody in management is around for long enough to realise, and or, learn from past experiences based on real data. No, in management you learn with how much praise your project gets, and it doesn’t really have to be sound technically to get that.
This myth comes up surprisingly often. I've never met a junior developer that could match my productivity as a senior developer. Not to say they're bad in any way, but I've got literally decades more experience in the tools and technologies they're just learning. Maybe they're willing to work longer hours, but they aren't being nearly as productive in those hours as a senior dev.