You have to hire senior people anyway if you want to measure by quality/quantity of work output.
The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead.
The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers.
In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth.
Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.
I agree you get better return from seniors, which is why everybody wants to hire seniors. But we get new seniors by training juniors/letting them get experience. I think 5 juniors + 1 senior isn’t the way to do it, you should have at least 1 senior per junior (better still more seniors than juniors). Then you still get stuff done (maybe a bit less than if you didn’t have the juniors) and a few years later you have a couple new useful intermediate developers (and a few years after that they’ll be experienced seniors).
The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead.
The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers.
In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth.
Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.