The single hardest thing we've maintained over six years is the senior-only floor. Every quarter, the economics argue against it. Every quarter, the dilution argument resurfaces. What if we put one G5 on the bench, just on this one engagement, just to keep margin? Every quarter we don't, and the policy compounds.
What 'senior' actually filters for
Six years of practice doesn't guarantee judgment, but five years of practice rarely produces it. The seniority floor isn't a credential check; it's a filter for a kind of professional maturity that lets engineers say no to bad architecture, push back on aggressive scope, and own outcomes after the engagement closes. We hire for that maturity; the years are a proxy.
What the floor changes
- First-call conversations are substantive, engineers can architect on the call rather than relay back
- Department leads can co-pilot rather than supervise, the squad doesn't need translation
- Engagement scope holds up to client pushback because the engineers who scoped it understood the trade-offs
- Production handoff includes someone who has been on-call for production systems before
- Compensation discipline becomes possible, bands are real because the floor is real
The pattern we learned to avoid
Every firm we've watched dilute the senior-only policy did it the same way. They didn't decide to. They had a Q4 capacity crunch, hired 'just one G5 contractor for this one project', didn't convert them off, and then the next quarter the second G5 felt easier than the first. Within a year the floor was gone in practice while still alive in marketing copy. The senior-only floor isn't strategy; it's hiring discipline applied through every cycle of cash-flow pressure that argues against it.