Imagine that you are about to tackle a new project that will take more than a year. This might be a new system, perhaps a cloud migration, or maybe it's rewriting something that doesn't work well. You don't have enough employees to undertake the project without overloading everyone. Your team needs to grow.

Would you rather hire a more senior person from outside the organization or pick a junior person that's already inside your company and teach them what they need to know? Think about this as if you were the one making the decision about the future direction of your software team. Philosophically, do you want to buy experienced people or train/build new ones from your internal staff.

It's an interesting idea and for a lot of companies, I see them looking outside the company first, rather than investing in, and training, their internal staffers to grow. It takes time to train and grow people, for sure, and it's a constant investment that never goes away. At the same time, bringing people in from the outside also requires some level of training on how the current systems and org work, even if the new hire has a lot of experience.

I think there are good reasons to look at both of these, but my view is that I want to have people on a team that know how to work together. The tech skills (or design, modeling, etc.) can be taught, and I would rather have a good cultural fit, already knowing how a person fits with others. That assumes I've got good employees who fit together and believe in our culture. That's hard enough to do, which is why I want to hire people who can work as a team and keep them. Part of the "keeping" them is investing in them.

This also means that if people don't fit in, I want to help them move on to a better fit.

This doesn't mean I want everyone to think the same. It is important to have a variety of views on how to design and build applications. A variety of people is important, but we have to be a team.

I prefer to train and invest in the people I have over bringing in more experienced staffers. A big part of why I feel this way is that hiring is always a gamble, and it seems we make no shortage of mistakes. If I do get it right, then I want to grow and keep those people around for the long term.