Fred Brooks proposed "surgical team" structure, where as people gain experience they "bud out" new teams - i.e. the most senior after "the surgeon" ultimately leave team to become "surgeon" of a new team
I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right.
A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines
That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.
What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.
In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
A surgery team has a surgeon an anesthesiologist, a nurse specialized on material handling overseeing the material usage in the procedure, maybe a nurse specialized on equipment handling. None of those people are junior or subordinated to the others.
You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan.
Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors.
That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.