Your growth isn’t hindered by new senior hires
I often hear engineers complaining that they cannot grow because their company hires too many senior engineers and that it should instead grow its current employees. If you work in a growing tech company, new hires aren’t the reason you can’t get promoted.
In a growing company where staffing is the most scarce resource, there are tons of unstaffed opportunities for you to grow and get you to the next level. For every projects, there are also different ways to do execute them, e.g.:
- A junior engineer might just implement a brittle hack for the problem
- A more senior engineer might refactor some code to build a more robust solution
- A even more senior engineer might solve the problem for the whole company with zero/low maintenance cost
To address the second point (the company should grow current employees), mentoring and growing someone takes time and until they are ready, you can’t assign them tons of critical and hard projects – it’s also not obvious that people will be able to grow to the next level in the first place. You need senior engineers to mentor junior ones, so having new senior hires is a good thing for you. Practically speaking for you, it will have a stronger promo packet because of senior feedback.
Last but not least, tech companies hire senior engineers from FAANG (or some big tech companies) when they start running into issues related to their scale. These are hard problems that are time sensitive and costly to address – so companies want to make sure they solve them right the first time. Again this is an opportunity for you to learn from more senior people and grow faster – it’s much more efficient than trying and failing multiple times.