November 12, 2025 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Internal Staff Growth.
November 12, 2025 at 9:20 am
Some years ago, I was told on a Friday afternoon that a bunch of college graduates were joining us on Monday. I was voluntold that I was assigned one of them.
Monday had me running around with my hair on fire, arranging a syllabus, getting my business equivalent partner to agree to part of it, and catching up with the rest of the people who were also assigned a graduate. We agreed that we needed to rotate the graduates amongst us to make sure that they got the best possible jump start.
Those graduates all became high fliers and stayed with us far longer than the average new starters. They are now all seniors, principals and in a couple of cases, CTOs of medium to large companies.
They were all worth the effort, and the ROI was high. From a technical point of view, hiring people and training them up works well. The caveat to that is that you must design your education program; it doesn't just happen, unless you have a useful idiot to run around with their hair on fire, arranging things.
Despite this experience, the company slipped back into hiring seniors. The problem was that the HR process for promoting people was excruciating, verging on sadomasochism. It was far easier to recruit a senior on a high salary than to recruit a junior and grow them.
I've spoken to peers, and their experience of promoting tech people is much the same. In addition to painful promotion processes, there is also the unwritten rule that no annual review gets an "exceeds expectation" grade. I'm sure this doesn't apply to all companies, but it seems more prevalent than it should.
I've found that tech people are curious, experimental and keen to grow. As a manager, I don't have to motivate them; I just have to shield them from the things that demotivate them.
November 12, 2025 at 2:27 pm
This is a hard topic to address and think about. I've interviewed several people to join our team throughout my career, but I've never been a part of a team trying to decide if we should train or hire from outside. Where I work, we're currently going through a phase of hiring outside people who are just starting their careers and most are from outside of the US, where I live. I don't know why this is. Longer ago we would hire senior professionals to fill positions. And I've noticed problems and successes with both types of people.
Rod
November 12, 2025 at 4:22 pm
This is a hard topic to address and think about. I've interviewed several people to join our team throughout my career, but I've never been a part of a team trying to decide if we should train or hire from outside. Where I work, we're currently going through a phase of hiring outside people who are just starting their careers and most are from outside of the US, where I live. I don't know why this is. Longer ago we would hire senior professionals to fill positions. And I've noticed problems and successes with both types of people.
Sounds like the company you work for is just trying to save money. Is there any other reason to go with less experience than over more experience?
EDIT: I end up answering my question (above) in my post to this issue. Not having to un-train people's bad habits is a big benefit of hiring less experienced workers.
November 12, 2025 at 4:32 pm
I use to work at a place that almost always promoted from within. The benefit is that you save about 6 months of time since the new team member comes in knowing the company and its business processes. The downside is that they likely won't be very useful for the first 6 months while they get up to speed (learn) the things they need to know to do SQL Server work. You also don't have to un-teach their bad habits.
Also, promoting from within allows you to promote someone who you likely know already, maybe worked with -- you get fewer surprises on the intangibles.
I'm not a manager so i've not had to concern myself with salaries, but promoting from within is always cheaper in regards to salaries.
Presumably, this person you are promoting from within is going to take over other people's duties to free them up to work on the new project.
November 12, 2025 at 4:58 pm
As someone who was part of a layoff, only to see a similar role(they added some things I didn't have knowledge of) get posted shortly after my layoff, I think it just depends on the CIO. Now I was asked several time over my years at the company if there was anything new I wanted to learn. Early on I took a course on the new 'IT thing at the time. I was never allowed or got the chance to use that knowledge. If I don't use it, I loose it. So why wouldn't they ask me to either learn these new things or I'd loose my job? At least give me the chance.
That being said, I'm thinking of taking an early retirement. It's been 4 months since the layoff, I've applied for over 60 jobs and I've only had 3 initial phone interviews and one follow up zoom interview. It's been very frustrating to say the least.
I've been working in IT for over 34 years now. At some point you just get tired of the same old BS at every company. 😉
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November 12, 2025 at 5:01 pm
When you grow internal staff, does that mean they take on new responsibilities in addition to their old responsibilities? Or does it mean that you move them into a new role and then have to re-hire for their previous position?
If I would need to keep my prior workload, I'd rather be hired in as a senior who doesn't have to worry about that.
November 12, 2025 at 9:44 pm
I have many years of experience in IT as an employee as well as a consultant. As I see it you need to hire all of the above.
Hire inexperienced staff you can train in your business and your best practices (you need to have best practices) and encourage them to learn and promote the good ones and help the others move on to another company.
Hire from outside to get a jump start on technology new to your team.
Hire from outside to cause a disruption so your existing staff will get a new perspective on technology or best practices.
Require team members to learn by providing them mandatory company time for training. Studying for certifications is a good way to learn more about the product you use and inspire you to try something new to them, whether you get the certification or not.
Don't let AI be a mentor to anyone on anything for the next several years until it matures and let your human mentors determine which ones are worth using.
November 12, 2025 at 11:31 pm
I have many years of experience in IT as an employee as well as a consultant. As I see it you need to hire all of the above.
Hire inexperienced staff you can train in your business and your best practices (you need to have best practices) and encourage them to learn and promote the good ones and help the others move on to another company.
Hire from outside to get a jump start on technology new to your team.
Hire from outside to cause a disruption so your existing staff will get a new perspective on technology or best practices.
Require team members to learn by providing them mandatory company time for training. Studying for certifications is a good way to learn more about the product you use and inspire you to try something new to them, whether you get the certification or not.
Don't let AI be a mentor to anyone on anything for the next several years until it matures and let your human mentors determine which ones are worth using.
Well, maybe. Your suggestion of hiring from outside to jump start new technologies in a company works only if the environment is conducive to that. The state department where I work has in the last 2 years hired almost exclusively young IT and developers from India. We've had other Asiatic Indians who've worked for us in the past, and they've gotten along well with everyone. But this new group of people are entirely different from the people who've come before. They come with skills that I would love to learn. I've talked to some of them, over the last two years, asking if they could share those skillsets with the rest of us. They've said yes, but then never do. It is a fact they keep to themselves, and others aren't allowed in their clique.
Rod
November 13, 2025 at 10:31 am
You often need a bigger team to build a system than you do to keep it running once implemented, so it makes sense for some of that team to be hired from outside so that they can leave at the end of the project. Of course you also need a few people from inside the company working on the project otherwise you'll have no-one left who understands the system/platform. Knowledge transfer from the external experts to the internal learners is key during the build phase.
November 13, 2025 at 1:58 pm
Well, maybe. Your suggestion of hiring from outside to jump start new technologies in a company works only if the environment is conducive to that. The state department where I work has in the last 2 years hired almost exclusively young IT and developers from India. We've had other Asiatic Indians who've worked for us in the past, and they've gotten along well with everyone. But this new group of people are entirely different from the people who've come before. They come with skills that I would love to learn. I've talked to some of them, over the last two years, asking if they could share those skillsets with the rest of us. They've said yes, but then never do. It is a fact they keep to themselves, and others aren't allowed in their clique.
I'm just curious, what skills do they have that they are not sharing? I keep thinking I need to future proof my career by adding some expertise in open source, but I never seem to have time.
November 13, 2025 at 6:00 pm
I use to work at a place that almost always promoted from within. The benefit is that you save about 6 months of time since the new team member comes in knowing the company and its business processes. The downside is that they likely won't be very useful for the first 6 months while they get up to speed (learn) the things they need to know to do SQL Server work. You also don't have to un-teach their bad habits.
Also, promoting from within allows you to promote someone who you likely know already, maybe worked with -- you get fewer surprises on the intangibles.
...
The unlearning bad habits (or different ones) is a good point. You never know if you can actually do that with an outside hire.
November 13, 2025 at 6:06 pm
As someone who was part of a layoff, only to see a similar role(they added some things I didn't have knowledge of) get posted shortly after my layoff, I think it just depends on the CIO. Now I was asked several time over my years at the company if there was anything new I wanted to learn. Early on I took a course on the new 'IT thing at the time. I was never allowed or got the chance to use that knowledge. If I don't use it, I loose it. So why wouldn't they ask me to either learn these new things or I'd loose my job? At least give me the chance.
That being said, I'm thinking of taking an early retirement. It's been 4 months since the layoff, I've applied for over 60 jobs and I've only had 3 initial phone interviews and one follow up zoom interview. It's been very frustrating to say the least.
I've been working in IT for over 34 years now. At some point you just get tired of the same old BS at every company. 😉
Sorry to hear that. I think there are a lot of companies that are short-sighted or emotional about staffing. Layoffs are often about who is liked or disliked as much as their performance, which is a bit sad. It's also why soft skills are important.
This is a tough time. While most of us aren't Google/MS/AMZN/etc., it seems no shortage of IT leaders take their steer from what those companies do and many are being cautious of hiring (or hoping AI lets them avoid it).
Best of luck with either path.
November 13, 2025 at 6:08 pm
When you grow internal staff, does that mean they take on new responsibilities in addition to their old responsibilities? Or does it mean that you move them into a new role and then have to re-hire for their previous position?
If I would need to keep my prior workload, I'd rather be hired in as a senior who doesn't have to worry about that.
I think it could be either one. If you promote someone, then you should backfill their spot. I've also worked with customers that explicitly do training programs to help people move jobs, say from help desk to web dev or DBA. They do backfill on the help desk.
I prefer to be hired at my level in a new place, but I'd more prefer to move up in the company and stay when I enjoy the company
November 13, 2025 at 6:09 pm
I have many years of experience in IT as an employee as well as a consultant. As I see it you need to hire all of the above.
Hire inexperienced staff you can train in your business and your best practices (you need to have best practices) and encourage them to learn and promote the good ones and help the others move on to another company.
Hire from outside to get a jump start on technology new to your team.
Hire from outside to cause a disruption so your existing staff will get a new perspective on technology or best practices.
Require team members to learn by providing them mandatory company time for training. Studying for certifications is a good way to learn more about the product you use and inspire you to try something new to them, whether you get the certification or not.
Don't let AI be a mentor to anyone on anything for the next several years until it matures and let your human mentors determine which ones are worth using.
Agreed. AI can be an assistant or helper, but certainly not a mentor.
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