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> People are held to different standards based on number of years of work rather than their accomplishments. Looking at the spectrum of software organizations
by friendzis 9y ago
> People are held to different standards based on number of years of work rather than their accomplishments.
Looking at the spectrum of software organizations at one end there are product shops baking simple mobile apps or dressing up WordPress, at the other end - enterprise grade vendors with codebase lifetimes reaching into decades. Those bakeries tend to have small number of experienced engineers/project managers and a high number of cheap fresh grads who will somehow ship something. In those large enterprises juniors are usually required to show ability at baking code and some experience. So we see that years of experience is not necessarily pervasive metric.
> So why are many companies grouping applicants by years of experience, and not by quality?
Bootcamps are based on the very same principle - sharper individuals can be trained in basic principles of baking Angular/Laravel/Spring code in a summer. Competent developer can more or less switch frameworks in even shorter timeframe. Baking code according to spec is not the biggest issue in software engineering. There are two aspects here.
SW industry has a pervasive problem of people burning out and leaving industry and opportunists attempting for good pay. Years of experience can show applicants' ability to live in this Absurdistan that is SW engineering. Years of experience is a metric allowing to chose applicants who will commit to work at relatively low false positive rate (albeit at absurdly high false negative rate). Another aspect is "smelling shit sooner than seeing". In a long term project senior engineers able to scream "Boys and girls of every age, hold your keyboards, this looks good, doesn't work. Been there done that" are crucial to success and that comes with direct experience not from reading books. Years of experience, while it may not be perfect or even unsuitable in certain situations, is not unjustified metric.