Hire Senior Devs. Really.

There’s a piece of startup advice floating around LinkedIn along the lines of, “Don’t hire senior devs; it’s an expensive mistake because they’ll over-engineer everything instead of shipping fast.” The thought is that these senior devs get stuck on arcane details, make unreasonable demands on the purity of the codebase, build complexity that’s overkill for your company and endlessly debate architecture choices instead of building products for your customers.

Add that to the pile of confusing or outright wrong advice that non-technical founders are subject to.

While it’s true that in the early stages of your venture, over-engineering is lethal, I have to wonder where people find all these over-engineering seniors. If you get a senior developer who is senior by skill and not just by “years in front of a computer”, they will have gained the business sense to ask the right questions:

• What are we building?

• Why are we building it?

• For whom are we building it?

• What are hard constraints, what are soft constraints?

If a developer asks these questions of an early-stage startup and comes up with “well obviously we need a fleet of 42 microservices that our 4-person team will have to build, maintain, deploy, and orchestrate”, they’re not a senior, they’re a junior who picked up the right buzzwords to impress in an interview.

Maybe that’s what’s really prompting these posts: People who thought they hired a senior but got someone with no sense of how business needs drive engineering decisions. However, deciding to only hire junior developers is the wrong response to that. The junior may or may not overcomplicate your architecture. But if they keep it exceedingly simple, it’s not because they made an informed trade-off; it’s because they don’t know any other way.

You can't ship fast by avoiding experience; you ship fast by working with people who know which corners to cut.