The assumption here is that a senior engineer with ~10 years of experience doing "junior" tasks does not need 40h/week to accomplish his tasks. Probably only half of that. In practice, however, things can get a bit more complicated; what's described above is just pure theory.
Example:
- Junior task: we need a new http GET endpoint to retrieve the list of attendees for a given meeting. The input and output looks as follows... No pagination is needed. Everything should be already setup, you just need to add the code that does the retrieval. Estimated time: X story points (let's say 1 or 2 days)
vs.
- Senior task: we need to setup the new X microservice. Please, setup auth and use this template the infra team is providing (some Terraform+GitLab ci/cd templates that sometimes do not work as defined). Add monitoring, and implement one useful http endpoint so that junior engineers can just take it as an example and can add more endpoints themselves. Also, if the service goes down on a Sunday morning, guess who's going to be on-call? Not the junior engineer. Estimated time: Y story points (let's say 3 or 4 days).
Now, I would need 1h to implement the junior task (tests included!) and I would probably ace it (if not, the hell I have been doing for 10 years?). For the senior task: all I see is complication down the rabbit hole (e.g., why are we using k8s for this? The templates do not work in some scenarios, who can help me improve them? I like to spend Sunday mornings with my kids, btw.
Good point! As it is said above, it's all just pure theory. But, let's imagine what would happen:
If somehow a "junior" member of your team seems to produce high-quality code (for "junior" standards) that require zero help from other team members, and always on time, then I guess the team would be fine with the "junior" participating minimally in meeting calls (perhaps even with the camera off... now here I'm assuming 100% remote, something I didn't explicitly said before).
>If somehow a "junior" member of your team seems to produce high-quality code (for "junior" standards) that require zero help from other team members, and always on time, then I guess the team would be fine with the "junior" participating minimally in meeting calls (perhaps even with the camera off... now here I'm assuming 100% remote, something I didn't explicitly said before).
Not gonna happen
First, they're gonna wonder how you're "magically" doing so well - and then either want to push you out, or move you up to a "senior" role
Second, you have to participate in team calls - regardless of your relative seniority, "participating minimally" is going to get you canned
You underestimate how a sleep people are at the wheel or just busy with their own stuff, at least in smaller companies, just no time to think "Let's push this junior out, he is doing too well". Not attending meetings could still cause some questions though.
Example:
- Junior task: we need a new http GET endpoint to retrieve the list of attendees for a given meeting. The input and output looks as follows... No pagination is needed. Everything should be already setup, you just need to add the code that does the retrieval. Estimated time: X story points (let's say 1 or 2 days)
vs.
- Senior task: we need to setup the new X microservice. Please, setup auth and use this template the infra team is providing (some Terraform+GitLab ci/cd templates that sometimes do not work as defined). Add monitoring, and implement one useful http endpoint so that junior engineers can just take it as an example and can add more endpoints themselves. Also, if the service goes down on a Sunday morning, guess who's going to be on-call? Not the junior engineer. Estimated time: Y story points (let's say 3 or 4 days).
Now, I would need 1h to implement the junior task (tests included!) and I would probably ace it (if not, the hell I have been doing for 10 years?). For the senior task: all I see is complication down the rabbit hole (e.g., why are we using k8s for this? The templates do not work in some scenarios, who can help me improve them? I like to spend Sunday mornings with my kids, btw.