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One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what t

One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing. Some people are doing the exact same thing they were doing years ago and have no depth. Your challenge will be to paint a different picture. Which is easily possible. It sounds like you are interviewing but maybe not doing well face to face. Maybe you just need more prep and its not a deep issue?

thesmallestcat 9y ago
What does that really mean, "1 year of experience 7 times"? The candidate has the memory of a goldfish and literally relearns their skills every year? I think you're undervaluing experience in general.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  It means they haven't really grown through their 7 years to do more advanced things and work on more complex projects. Adding features to the average business CRUD app on a LAMP stack for seven years straight is a lot different than applying your skills and energy to things like distributed systems, bigger scale projects, learning better abstractions and design patterns, etc.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    Actually, as I've seen it used, it usually is an alternate way of saying "that person is a job-hopper." The actual work on the resume is less relevant to a person using this phrase, usually, in my experience, than that they have had "sticking power" to stay with a given project through multiple phases (development, maintenance, etc.).
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - robalfonso 9y ago
      For me it actually means the same thing over and over. Had a guy with "15 years" of experience interview one time. He analyzed scientific data, sounded good. When we got into it he'd literally been writing/managing a parser in perl for a data sent with only minor changes. He did this for 15 years. Terrific waste of time. That guy was what I meant. He'd solved a specific set of problems over and over and never grown beyond that.
- cpeterso 9y ago
  At big companies, it's easy for a junior developer to get stuck maintaining the same feature and not learning about different domains or tools.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  It's a way to easily dismiss 7 years of working experience. Generally it means that the person being discussed hasn't spent those years acquiring skills that are specifically useful to the interviewer. So the years spent acquiring different skills don't count. The intent is probably to say that the interviewee has spent 7 continuous years doing a job that can be done as easily by a person with one year of experience as someone with more, and therefore does not provide the necessary challenges to stimulate development in the employee. But again, it is still summarily dismissing actual experience just because it didn't happen in the right place, and is a variant of "not invented here" syndrome. The people who say things like that should likely not be discussing "years of experience" at all, as their focus seems to be on breadth and depth of skillsets. The "seven years of experience" guy likely knows how to do X, Y, and Z, while the "one year of experience 7 times" guy likely only knows how to do X. In that case, talk about X, Y, and Z, instead of T.
  - robalfonso 9y ago
    It's definitely an issue of selling oneself. You either get stuck with an interviewer if your resume is not great or if you don't sell what you can do. There are people that either via the jobs they choose or the long tenure at a company haven't built a strong case that they can tackle anything other then a small domain of problems. I had an interview once who had 15 years of managing scientific data (he wrote a parser then changed it when the data set had format changes a few times a year) that parser and platform remained unchanged for 15 years and he had no other duty. Another interviewee had only built WordPress sites for 4 years. He had no other projects (hobby or professional) to illustrate he could do more. I see your point regarding a skill set that is maybe just not useful to the interviewer, certainly in 7 years there should be more. People can and do spend time working on very narrow problems though.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      That parser guy had 15 years of experience with that one single parser. If he spent 15 years doing 15 different things a year at a time--one year of experience 15 times--he would have had a broader, but shallower skill set. That wouldn't be more valuable in general, but it would be more likely to include skills that any particular interviewer values. But then he would still be dismissed as having "one year of experience, 15 times" from a guy who maybe wants someone with 15 years of experience specifically in writing parsers. Time is a limited resource, and it belongs to the individual. You can't reasonably expect that someone will spend it making themselves more valuable to you when you aren't paying them, or even holding out a reasonable prospect of paying them in the future. By happy coincidence, there are plenty of people out there that will make themselves more valuable to 10000 interviewers just like you, by acquiring skills that seem to be popular or becoming popular, but there are many more that won't live their lives for other people on the off chance that it might be rewarded someday. You can't really measure skills by how long someone has done something. Some people can learn a new skill and be better at it after two weeks than someone who has done it for ten years. And there are also people who can practice a skill for ten years and be 100000 times better at it than the guy who just learned it two weeks ago. To make those judgments, you have to be able to measure aptitude, rather than just read timespans off a resume. And right there, with the WordPress guy, you're implying that he wasted 4 years of his time because he didn't spend any of it preemptively learning any of the things you find valuable. Why should he? He hadn't even met you yet. How long had your job posting been open, declaiming that your company would need someone with M years of experience in skill X when it starts hiring for that in N years? (Yes, I know that's not how it works.) Did you even try to gauge how skilled he was able to become at WordPress site development after four years? Did you wonder why it took him 4 long years of doing just that before wanting to move on to something else? Or did you preemptively strike him off your list for having no prior "years of experience" in skill X? My point is that I would very much prefer it if the industry hired for general aptitude rather than specific skills. If that doesn't happen, I would still prefer it if interviewing companies used a different metric for measuring the skills they find valuable than the total time spent practicing them. The glib comparison between "N years of experience" and "1 year of experience, N times" just presses all of my rage buttons at once. It almost perfectly highlights the gross disrespect that potential employers have towards job-seekers whom they perceive as unfit to serve them. It is part of the arrogance that prevents companies from critically examining their own hiring processes.
toexitthedonut 9y ago
>One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing. I think this is very real. So how do you correct this problem and sell the perception that you are able to do well? Interview prep, like Pramp? I did get some feedback from TripleByte at least.
- robalfonso 9y ago
  Without knowing you - it's hard to say. Ultimately having confidence and being able to demonstrate how your history makes you a good fit is going to combat that perception. When you tell people about your work history - does it sound mostly like the same kind of problems/tasks? How can you show you did more than that? Any outside projects you have that show diversity in experience? Regarding your statement about Pramp - are you failing on the coding part of interviews? Not to get into the validity of white board exercises as a method for filtering candidates - I personally don't think putting people on the spot is a skill set that you actually need to do the work. Is it possible you are stuck in a rut due to troublesome interviews? As I said above lack of confidence to sell yourself can be sabotaging you.

thesmallestcat 9y ago

What does that really mean, "1 year of experience 7 times"? The candidate has the memory of a goldfish and literally relearns their skills every year? I think you're undervaluing experience in general.

tedmiston 9y ago
It means they haven't really grown through their 7 years to do more advanced things and work on more complex projects. Adding features to the average business CRUD app on a LAMP stack for seven years straight is a lot different than applying your skills and energy to things like distributed systems, bigger scale projects, learning better abstractions and design patterns, etc.
- sidlls 9y ago
  Actually, as I've seen it used, it usually is an alternate way of saying "that person is a job-hopper." The actual work on the resume is less relevant to a person using this phrase, usually, in my experience, than that they have had "sticking power" to stay with a given project through multiple phases (development, maintenance, etc.).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - robalfonso 9y ago
    For me it actually means the same thing over and over. Had a guy with "15 years" of experience interview one time. He analyzed scientific data, sounded good. When we got into it he'd literally been writing/managing a parser in perl for a data sent with only minor changes. He did this for 15 years. Terrific waste of time. That guy was what I meant. He'd solved a specific set of problems over and over and never grown beyond that.
cpeterso 9y ago
At big companies, it's easy for a junior developer to get stuck maintaining the same feature and not learning about different domains or tools.
logfromblammo 9y ago
It's a way to easily dismiss 7 years of working experience. Generally it means that the person being discussed hasn't spent those years acquiring skills that are specifically useful to the interviewer. So the years spent acquiring different skills don't count. The intent is probably to say that the interviewee has spent 7 continuous years doing a job that can be done as easily by a person with one year of experience as someone with more, and therefore does not provide the necessary challenges to stimulate development in the employee. But again, it is still summarily dismissing actual experience just because it didn't happen in the right place, and is a variant of "not invented here" syndrome. The people who say things like that should likely not be discussing "years of experience" at all, as their focus seems to be on breadth and depth of skillsets. The "seven years of experience" guy likely knows how to do X, Y, and Z, while the "one year of experience 7 times" guy likely only knows how to do X. In that case, talk about X, Y, and Z, instead of T.
- robalfonso 9y ago
  It's definitely an issue of selling oneself. You either get stuck with an interviewer if your resume is not great or if you don't sell what you can do. There are people that either via the jobs they choose or the long tenure at a company haven't built a strong case that they can tackle anything other then a small domain of problems. I had an interview once who had 15 years of managing scientific data (he wrote a parser then changed it when the data set had format changes a few times a year) that parser and platform remained unchanged for 15 years and he had no other duty. Another interviewee had only built WordPress sites for 4 years. He had no other projects (hobby or professional) to illustrate he could do more. I see your point regarding a skill set that is maybe just not useful to the interviewer, certainly in 7 years there should be more. People can and do spend time working on very narrow problems though.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    That parser guy had 15 years of experience with that one single parser. If he spent 15 years doing 15 different things a year at a time--one year of experience 15 times--he would have had a broader, but shallower skill set. That wouldn't be more valuable in general, but it would be more likely to include skills that any particular interviewer values. But then he would still be dismissed as having "one year of experience, 15 times" from a guy who maybe wants someone with 15 years of experience specifically in writing parsers. Time is a limited resource, and it belongs to the individual. You can't reasonably expect that someone will spend it making themselves more valuable to you when you aren't paying them, or even holding out a reasonable prospect of paying them in the future. By happy coincidence, there are plenty of people out there that will make themselves more valuable to 10000 interviewers just like you, by acquiring skills that seem to be popular or becoming popular, but there are many more that won't live their lives for other people on the off chance that it might be rewarded someday. You can't really measure skills by how long someone has done something. Some people can learn a new skill and be better at it after two weeks than someone who has done it for ten years. And there are also people who can practice a skill for ten years and be 100000 times better at it than the guy who just learned it two weeks ago. To make those judgments, you have to be able to measure aptitude, rather than just read timespans off a resume. And right there, with the WordPress guy, you're implying that he wasted 4 years of his time because he didn't spend any of it preemptively learning any of the things you find valuable. Why should he? He hadn't even met you yet. How long had your job posting been open, declaiming that your company would need someone with M years of experience in skill X when it starts hiring for that in N years? (Yes, I know that's not how it works.) Did you even try to gauge how skilled he was able to become at WordPress site development after four years? Did you wonder why it took him 4 long years of doing just that before wanting to move on to something else? Or did you preemptively strike him off your list for having no prior "years of experience" in skill X? My point is that I would very much prefer it if the industry hired for general aptitude rather than specific skills. If that doesn't happen, I would still prefer it if interviewing companies used a different metric for measuring the skills they find valuable than the total time spent practicing them. The glib comparison between "N years of experience" and "1 year of experience, N times" just presses all of my rage buttons at once. It almost perfectly highlights the gross disrespect that potential employers have towards job-seekers whom they perceive as unfit to serve them. It is part of the arrogance that prevents companies from critically examining their own hiring processes.

toexitthedonut 9y ago

>One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing. I think this is very real. So how do you correct this problem and sell the perception that you are able to do well? Interview prep, like Pramp? I did get some feedback from TripleByte at least.

robalfonso 9y ago
Without knowing you - it's hard to say. Ultimately having confidence and being able to demonstrate how your history makes you a good fit is going to combat that perception. When you tell people about your work history - does it sound mostly like the same kind of problems/tasks? How can you show you did more than that? Any outside projects you have that show diversity in experience? Regarding your statement about Pramp - are you failing on the coding part of interviews? Not to get into the validity of white board exercises as a method for filtering candidates - I personally don't think putting people on the spot is a skill set that you actually need to do the work. Is it possible you are stuck in a rut due to troublesome interviews? As I said above lack of confidence to sell yourself can be sabotaging you.