This article reminds me of when a long time ago a senior manager was doing a presentation which had a tweet: "A team of senior engineers without juniors is just a team of engineers". This manager tried to make a point of how egalitarian we are because the team is so senior, but was quickly corrected by one of the engineers that they missed the point of the original tweet completely.
I really like how this article shifts the perspective of a senior developer:
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).
...
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.
The main point is that people who ask many questions (juniors) foster the culture of curiosity and psychological safety, while even for some more senior folks it might be too shameful to ask questions that "should" be "obvious" for those with many years in the industry. Therefore, without a culture of curiosity, many problems will be swiped under the rug.
And yet, this is way too hard these days for junior folks to find a job. Trading short-term gains for the cost of long-term consequences. This has never ever happened to humanity before!
#culture
