You can't git clone a team

Hiring Juniors, Training, and Ratios

• Many see a long‑running decline in companies training juniors; firms want “seniors only,” often with hyper‑specific stacks and exact years of experience.
• Others argue that below a certain skill level juniors can be net‑negative, so a minimum bar is rational.
• Several commenters stress that juniors only work well in small numbers within strong teams, with explicit mentoring processes. Too many juniors plus weak leadership leads to bad codebases.
• There’s debate over value: some claim one senior beats two juniors at the same cost; others counter juniors can handle less‑critical work, grow into seniors, and hiring/retention economics are self‑inflicted.

Remote Work and Mentoring

• Multiple people say juniors generally shouldn’t start fully remote: they miss passive learning and process osmosis.
• Hybrid or near‑office arrangements are described as working better; some companies explicitly keep juniors local for this reason.

Deep Systems / Hypervisor Talent

• The author’s situation (Xen‑based stack) sparks discussion on how hard it is to find people spanning kernel, hardware quirks, security, and orchestration.
• Some say systems work is far more complex than in the 1990s; training someone to proficiency can exceed a project’s lifetime, making corporate investment hard to justify and creating a “vicious loop” of talent shortage.
• Others note hypervisor interest hasn’t vanished; it shifted (e.g., to KVM/QEMU and related projects). Xen is seen as niche but still valuable for specific low‑latency, high‑security use cases.

AI, Learning, and “Cloning” Skill

• Opinions diverge on LLMs: some use them successfully as tutors or accelerators; others see them encouraging copy‑paste without understanding, especially for newcomers.
• In very low‑level domains, commenters say LLMs lack reliable training data; much expertise is “tribal” or under NDA, so neither humans nor models can easily access it.

Generalists, Careers, and Hiring Practices

• People who fit the “kernel to UX” description struggle to market themselves: hiring funnels and ATS favor narrow specialists and recent, keyword‑matching experience.
• Advice includes tailoring CVs per role, using networks and conferences, and sometimes downplaying breadth to avoid being dismissed as shallow generalists.
• Some argue such talent exists (e.g., at major systems conferences) but is concentrated at FAANG‑like employers; smaller players must offer competitive pay or exceptional conditions to attract them.

Compensation and Geography

• Especially in Europe, commenters note that deep, demanding systems work often pays only slightly above relaxed jobs, so few are willing to put in exceptional effort for average rewards.
• There’s skepticism toward companies that want rare talent but offer neither top‑tier pay nor substantial non‑monetary advantages.