Not only that but teaching is a fantastic way to learn. Its easy to miss the learning though because you get the most when you care. If you care you take time to think and you're forced to contend with things you've taken for granted. You're forced to revisit the things you've tabled because you didn't have the time or expertise to deal with it at the time.

There's no doubt about it, there's selfish reasons to teach, mentor, and have a junior under you. We're social creatures. It should be no surprise that what's good for the group is usually good for yourself too. It's kinda as if we were evolutionarily designed to be this way or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Everyone says they don't have time, but you get a lot of time by doing things right instead of doing things twice. And honestly, we're doing it a lot more than twice.

I just don't understand why we're so ready and willing to toss away a skill that allowed us to become the most successful creature on the planet: forethought. It's not just in coding but we're doing it everywhere. Maybe we're just overloaded but you need forethought to fix that, not progressively going fast for the sake of going fast

Your HR department doesn’t control the budget. They carry out directives from their management. This is endemic across the industry from small companies to in my experience of n=1 at BigTech.

Even there people get better offers coming in externally than they do an internal promotion.

On a related note, it was also easier coming in as an L6 (senior) than it was to get promoted from an L5 to an L6.

Most companies are like this. Even my n=1 experience at BigTech is that it is well known that you get more coming in at a certain level than you do when you get promoted to that level and it’s best to “boomerang”.

On an unrelated note: it’s also easier to get “promoted” to the next level by changing jobs and then coming back than it is to go through the internal promo process at the same BigTech company.