Growing a Junior-Heavy Team

Approaches to level up team members, and the realities of teams with fewer experienced engineers.

Q: I inherited a team that is 70% junior / 30% senior in terms of skill set. How can I help uplevel the team in terms of engineering skill?

If you’ve not found yourself in this situation before, it’s likely only a matter of time before you do. Hiring senior engineers is as challenging as it’s ever been and goes hand-in-hand with something I hear people reference quite frequently; the perception that companies don’t want to invest in junior engineers, but just want to hire senior engineers.

In this issue, we’ll cover several approaches you can use to level up a team in which most engineers have little to no experience: 

• Coding & engineering practices.

• Training. Which approaches work, and which are less successful?

• Getting things done.

• Hiring.

• Staying realistic.

• A checklist for growing a (junior-heavy) engineering team.