I’m glad some managers see it that way. I wish it were easier to get junior headcount. Our mobile team is very small so we have huge bus factor at all times. A couple of junior devs, say 1 for each of the mobile components in our stack (backend, iOS, android) would help mitigate those risks for comparatively cheap, on top of improving our overall velocity.
You never hire somebody senior and find they can do twice as much as you thought.
Generally juniors are expensive for their performance though. If they can do double what you thought it’s great but I’m not sure how much of a cost savings that is against an engineer coming in as a senior (not lead or staff - just a vetted competent programmer who works). Then again I’m not in management at all: I could have the performance-per-dollar figure entirely wrong.
We have a fairly big step up in pay from junior to senior. I can take on 2 or 3 juniors to a high senior or especially principle engineer.
We’re often also taking juniors on that we already have a relationship with through placements during their university course. That minimises the risk.
Internship placement would be great. Fighting to even get interns lately though. All management talks about is “efficiency” these days.
Using a SE 1-5 scale where 1 is junior - I’m generally talking about companies (or at least my current employer) preferring to hire SE2 rather than SE1. An SE2 is maybe 50% more expensive than an SE1 at {current employer} while an SE4 is about 3x an SE1.
A very small company I worked at basically only hired juniors right out of school but with the understanding that they’d stay on for at least a couple years to help out. The CEO was an engineer in the code though: fun shop. I trained 2 juniors there to competency… But it was a significant investment to do so.