What's your senior, mid and junior ratio?
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Let's start off by saying there is no golden or "right" ratio of Seniors to Mid to Juniors in an engineering team.
It depends on what you are optimising for? Cost?? Risk?? Experience?? Progression?? Short term?? Long term? It also depends on the domain, culture and stage of the organization.
The purpose of this article is to get you explicitly thinking about the blend of experience and skills in your teams.
In a tough economic climate, the temptation of tech leaders maybe to divert the budget to short-term impacts.?
We will assume 6 engineers and for simple cost modelling purposes we will use indicative annual salaries of:
Obviously, the actual annual cost of a team will also include additional roles, licensing, cloud, etc.?
?1. Seniors-only
?The Barkley Marathon of codebases. So difficult to navigate only the best/sadist need apply. Get that chequebook out.
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2. The Drawing Pin
?Some tasks just don't need Senior grunt. Slightly more cost-effective but it still screams battle scars reviewed during an 8-stage interview process.?? If your organisation isn't safe for junior developers what is the morale of your mid-level developers?
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3. The Tower
Equitable.? Vanilla.? Logical progression with built-in organisational resilience.? Already ￡150k cheaper than an all-senior team. You might even get some documentation done!
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4. The Dumbbell
Getting cheaper but your seniors are doing the heavy lifting with mentoring and your juniors need to grow up quick, your likely to have some difficult annual salary conversations or retention issues come April.
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5. The Pyramid
Probably like the management team, this option is cost conscious and thin on top.? You have a single point of failure unless you are knowledge sharing and the pack is ready to shuffle up.
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6. Lord of the flies
By far the cheapest option but quality is going to suffer with so few people to that know what good looks like.
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Only two of these six options have no Juniors.
The two most expensive options. Given the lack of junior postings on job boards are they the most common?
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Let us know in the comments. What are you optimising for and what was the ratio in teams you have worked in?
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