My personal experience with this is that the ratio matters A LOT. I.e. having juniors out number the seniors is bad.
When you have a team that mostly consist of junior and mid-level developers, then they will clique together and they will mostly likely "behave" like juniors. Typical junior behaviour is e.g. to rather than digging into the backlog for the next thing to work on when you're done with one thing, to just sit around and wait for a senior to give you the next task.
However, if you have a team of seniors, who behave like seniors, adding one junior to this team, the junior will in no-time start to behave like a senior. Act by example. Before you know it you will have a really valuable team member.
I've had the opposite problem with juniors in the past -- rush to solve tickets and get them committed, but the work done is awful. I honestly preferred the lazy juniors on the team. At least they were doing poor work but there was less of it to code review and fix.
I used to be on the pro junior side of things... but when you're on the earlier side of a startup (series a/b), juniors are a huge liability.
Best "junior" hire I made was recruiting someone in support who I thought was smart and conscientious. Turned him on to programming, mentored him, and now he's great.
I have no idea what the lesson from this has been. hiring is hard.
This is insightful. A senior dev shouldn’t be a “manager” for a group of juniors. It should be the norm.
The mistake I think is seeing junior/senior devs as a management hierarchy (in which you normally have a more senior person manage more than one junior staff member).
I remember being a junior. I'd either go looking for more to do, or take a bit of extra time to experiment with different ways to do whatever I was given.
Maybe this is more a personality thing, and it's just that people who don't think a certain way don't really make it to senior?
When you have a team that mostly consist of junior and mid-level developers, then they will clique together and they will mostly likely "behave" like juniors. Typical junior behaviour is e.g. to rather than digging into the backlog for the next thing to work on when you're done with one thing, to just sit around and wait for a senior to give you the next task.
However, if you have a team of seniors, who behave like seniors, adding one junior to this team, the junior will in no-time start to behave like a senior. Act by example. Before you know it you will have a really valuable team member.