3 ms·

> age != experience != skill Or, as a former boss of mine put it: "He has one year of experience ten times."

madengr 10y ago
Or maybe one year of experience, each in a specialized topic, which are all intertwined. I have 20 years experience in RF engineering, and probably a few years each in sub-disciplines that combine to form a full system. That is pretty valuable, especially being able to head off problems, due to prior experience with them.
- shubb 10y ago
  A whole career of very short jobs isn't great though. One particularly valuable kind of experience is seeing a project through and understanding how early decisions went awry later on. Some older coders I work with might not have obsessively learned the latest framework, but they can identify issues like "that's the kind of subsystem that one person ends up maintaining, and then they leave and it's awful", or "We did something similar in the 1990s, and it didn't go so well because it is overly complex. Is there a simpler way to do this?".
  - user5994461 10y ago
    > One particularly valuable kind of experience is seeing a project through and understanding how early decisions went awry later on. That's a good take on it, and the application of it vary with companies and industries. A waterfall EE project at a old school company could hardly deliver any stage in 6 months. A software project at a fast executing startup could have gone through 2 major delivered projects in that time.
  - madengr 10y ago
    Ha ha, I guess I'm screwed as I work in a job shop where no project lasts longer than 6 months. I love it though. Better that than the same project for several years.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  That's not the meaning of this saying. It's about maturity and development, not necessarily skills.
user5994461 10y ago
> "He has one year of experience ten times." Never understood this thing. One learns the most when he changes company and learnt about a new industry, with new problems, new tech, new people.
- Gracana 10y ago
  I've always understood that saying to mean "someone who learned everything they know in the first year, and coasted for the remaining nine," or something to that effect. Someone who never progresses.
- wolfgang42 10y ago
  I think this saying is generally applied more to people who stayed in the same industry (or even the same company) for ten years, yet still has the equivalent of one year's worth of experience (basically they just stopped learning after a while). Hiring someone like this doesn't get you anything that hiring someone with nine years less "experience" gets you, but that other person is more likely to keep learning things, and get more valuable over time.
- jasonlotito 10y ago
  In the world of programming, repercussions of what you do take longer than a year to full play out. Let's say you join a company, get up to speed quickly (let's say 3 months), and you get on your first product, start working on it, and after 6 months you release a beta. And 3 months after that, you launch. And then you are done, and you move on to the next company. You don't see the results of that year that you were there. You don't see the results of of long term maintenance. What worked, what didn't, where you wasted time, what was used, etc. Even the tools you used, you only used that to get it into production at some level, but you don't fully understand the full long-term impact. So when someone looks at that, they don't see production level experience. They see that you've done the first years worth of work 10 times, and that you don't have experience with the results. That your experience doesn't mean you can build something that works in the long term. That you can even be counted on to work on something in the long term. That's just one of the ways it can be looked at.
- Ensorceled 10y ago

Or maybe one year of experience, each in a specialized topic, which are all intertwined. I have 20 years experience in RF engineering, and probably a few years each in sub-disciplines that combine to form a full system. That is pretty valuable, especially being able to head off problems, due to prior experience with them.

shubb 10y ago
A whole career of very short jobs isn't great though. One particularly valuable kind of experience is seeing a project through and understanding how early decisions went awry later on. Some older coders I work with might not have obsessively learned the latest framework, but they can identify issues like "that's the kind of subsystem that one person ends up maintaining, and then they leave and it's awful", or "We did something similar in the 1990s, and it didn't go so well because it is overly complex. Is there a simpler way to do this?".
- user5994461 10y ago
  > One particularly valuable kind of experience is seeing a project through and understanding how early decisions went awry later on. That's a good take on it, and the application of it vary with companies and industries. A waterfall EE project at a old school company could hardly deliver any stage in 6 months. A software project at a fast executing startup could have gone through 2 major delivered projects in that time.
- madengr 10y ago
  Ha ha, I guess I'm screwed as I work in a job shop where no project lasts longer than 6 months. I love it though. Better that than the same project for several years.
Ensorceled 10y ago
That's not the meaning of this saying. It's about maturity and development, not necessarily skills.

user5994461 10y ago

> "He has one year of experience ten times." Never understood this thing. One learns the most when he changes company and learnt about a new industry, with new problems, new tech, new people.

Gracana 10y ago
I've always understood that saying to mean "someone who learned everything they know in the first year, and coasted for the remaining nine," or something to that effect. Someone who never progresses.
wolfgang42 10y ago
I think this saying is generally applied more to people who stayed in the same industry (or even the same company) for ten years, yet still has the equivalent of one year's worth of experience (basically they just stopped learning after a while). Hiring someone like this doesn't get you anything that hiring someone with nine years less "experience" gets you, but that other person is more likely to keep learning things, and get more valuable over time.
jasonlotito 10y ago
In the world of programming, repercussions of what you do take longer than a year to full play out. Let's say you join a company, get up to speed quickly (let's say 3 months), and you get on your first product, start working on it, and after 6 months you release a beta. And 3 months after that, you launch. And then you are done, and you move on to the next company. You don't see the results of that year that you were there. You don't see the results of of long term maintenance. What worked, what didn't, where you wasted time, what was used, etc. Even the tools you used, you only used that to get it into production at some level, but you don't fully understand the full long-term impact. So when someone looks at that, they don't see production level experience. They see that you've done the first years worth of work 10 times, and that you don't have experience with the results. That your experience doesn't mean you can build something that works in the long term. That you can even be counted on to work on something in the long term. That's just one of the ways it can be looked at.
Ensorceled 10y ago