I have some sympathy with you here jimt.

Although I have been largely self-employed for nearly 30 years, I did spend a couple of years working as a Senior Design Engineer with a microwave communications company (that is really my love but jobs dont pay so well) in 1998-9. While there I suppose my time was 20-25% administration, co-ordination and technical writing, 50% design and the balance spent essentially mentoring the junior guys. The latter was possibly the most rewarding part of the job and actually helped the entire project run much more smoothly.

In the 50% I spent doing design work I could still outproduce 2 juniors - and do it with fewer redesigns, but that isn't the real point. By the time the project moved to production I had three good juniors who had been well apprenticed and in fact all of them were ready to move up a good level. So in fact after that we split the two seniors - each taking a new project. I took two of the juniors, the other senior took one and we hired three new juniors across the two jobs. I left shortly afterwards to migrate to Canada and one of my old juniors quite capably stepped into my position. Funniest thing is that I still have contact with these folk, and the same team is still together, sans me, and the owner of the company credits my "apprentice" system for building a really strong team and they still use the same process today. Net result, since 1999 two people left, me to immigrate and one guy went to England with his fiance, but he ended up going back! Over that period the team has grown from 5 to 18 staff, the original three juniors are now the three most senior staff.

The moral? Don't give seniors the scutt work - they don't like it. Let them mentor the juniors and they will all like it. Let them pass on the benefit of their experience and, at least in that case, everybody was a winner.

jdtoronto

In reply to Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from? by jdtoronto
in thread Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.