The current trend in tech companies: Hiring only senior developers

A common trend in the tech industry is to hire only senior developers. This is primarily because companies believe that by hiring a set of skills and experiences, these individuals will be operational from day one, thus saving the infamous ramp-up time.

Note Ramp-up: The phase that defines the start of production in an industry, aiming to commercialize a new product.

As a result, developers with little or no experience are often sidelined in the current hiring war. But does it really have to be this way?

Why have a technical Leader?

When a company hires good leaders, it enables them to build a team based on potential, personality, and attitude.

I understand that the role of a technical leader is to continually foster the growth of professionals around them, serving as a cultural example and empowering the team when necessary.

Enthusiastic and well-cared-for teams will take better care of your product and, consequently, your customers.

Interacting with people is the key differentiator of a leadership position. In fact, it should be a point of concern if the leader spends more time on individual tasks than interacting with their team members.

Consider this reflection: What is easier, teaching a senior developer with unprofessional behavior to be committed or teaching hard skills to a committed but less experienced professional?

A significant difference between good leaders and those in training is the ability to identify their team’s needs and decide on the best course of action, rather than having a one-size-fits-all solution.

It’s not possible to demand the much-acclaimed self-management from teams that are working 10 hours a day, constantly chasing the next delivery. Moreover, self-management is not something a leader should demand from the team at any time. Does your team have individuals who know how to self-manage? If the answer is no, you, as a leader, must teach this in daily interactions.

Unless you’re Thanos, things won’t change with a snap of your fingers.

Don’t believe that an established methodology or a famous development process will magically solve your team’s problems (Yes, I’m talking to you, Scrum).

What works for your team won’t necessarily work for others and vice versa. Build your own framework based on what works and constant process reviews.

The Cycle of Madness

Does your team spend more time fixing problems than delivering value, whether in the form of improvements or new features?

If the answer is yes, then your team is in the endless cycle of madness.

An overburdened team doesn’t have time to evolve. Developers who don’t have time to study or test new techniques, such as TDD (Test-Driven Development), won’t stop creating technical debt overnight.

Following this reasoning, if your team doesn’t have time to learn to test their own software better, they’ll spend most of their time putting out fires.

If the technical leader imparts this knowledge or finds time for the team to learn more about it, the side effect will be fewer bugs and consequently more time.

Do you see how it’s a virtuous cycle of gradually having more calm to make decisions on the path to evolution? More time to invest, more fruits to reap.

Your role as a technical leadership in near-chaos scenarios is to create time for your team to evolve.

How to Identify That the Cycle of Madness Is Over?

Basically with two points:

• There is time to learn.
• The time is used to learn.

When only the first point is present, it means your team is simply delivering less without any apparent reason.

There must be constant attention to ensure the second point happens.

How to Stay in This Phase Healthily?

• Bring challenges to the developers to keep them out of their technical comfort zone.
• Focus on one learning at a time. We don’t want anyone on the team to enter a cycle of madness again, but this time due to learning. Remember: previously, they didn’t learn anything, now they are learning. Take it slow.
• Monitor! Numbers are important. Without numbers, your assessments will be subjective. Monitoring is not for creating a ranking among people or encouraging competition but for motivating each person to be better based on their own numbers. I can’t see any good intention in comparing numbers among people.

Note: The goal is not to create a hellish life for anyone. Mental health is important, challenge while respecting individual limits.

Is That All There Is to Being a Technical Leader?

Actually, no. This approach provides a more rational way of working and people improving their technical skills. Now comes the moment where you, as a technical leader, truly show your invaluable worth: building new leaders.

The intention is for people to be leaders of themselves before thinking about leading others.

Self-Managing Teams

• Teach the team to solve their own problems.
• Teach the team to handle unexpected situations.

Do you know what will happen when the team can do these two things? You will achieve the much-desired self-management.

Do you understand how getting here involves a non-trivial process of team building?

At this point, the leader’s job no longer involves technical or professional coaching but maintaining the team’s current maturity level.

With this, it will be possible to:

• Have goals instead of tasks.
• sObserve and monitor the team for possible fluctuations to prevent regression in the team’s working mode.

Bonus

OKRs

It’s no wonder that OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) don’t work in every company. Teams that are not close to self-management need to be informed about what to do based on established goals because they haven’t developed the ability to choose quality actions to achieve the goals on their own.

I’ll repeat myself here, but hiring more seniors won’t solve this problem.

Conclusion

The technical leader plays a key role in creating high-performance and self-managing teams. If the technical leader is not developing better professionals, perhaps that person is just a technical reference or specialist in some technology topic — not a leader.

A good leader develops other leaders and guides the path to the much-discussed self-managing team.