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Experience = Full Time Work Experience. That's the only measure that they accept (and this is a formula dammit! We cannot go against that!). This seems to me

Experience = Full Time Work Experience. That's the only measure that they accept (and this is a formula dammit! We cannot go against that!). This seems to me to be a complete lack of understanding about what makes a good programmer (Assumption: We pay people according to merit.). I have a friend who was in another industry for several years. She taught herself Ruby and Rails and became very, very good at doing so. It was all done as a personal project. She never was fully employed as a "Full Time Developer" until last year. At the point of her being hired last year, she could write web applications better than most seasoned programmers. Yes, yes. Anecdote does not make data. But they are proposing that they have come up with The Algorithm with How to Pay Programmers. If that was true, then they could handle this situation. Instead, they would have to come up with a 'special exception' for this particular person and compensate them correctly. If you get down to every little hole I could poke in this algorithm, you'd find out that almost everyone has a special circumstance and that throwing them into an inhuman algorithmic compensation experiment is Wrong(tm). Instead, you need people that can understand the nuances of Jim, Joe and Sally's situation and can do their best to serve their interests as well as the company's interests. I'm not saying that the status quo is great, but this 'perfect solution' is anything but.

gaius 15y ago
That's not unreasonable. Working as a professional programmer means a) understanding and solving other people's problems and b) operating under constraints not of your own choosing c) for 8 or more hours a day. That is relevant experience. I sometimes interview 22-year-olds who claim to have 10+ years experience...
- slindsey 15y ago
  "I sometimes interview 22-year-olds who claim to have 10+ years experience..." I agree with your sentiment and they certainly shouldn't present themselves as having 10+ years experience. But similarly, people doing the hiring need to consider this. I'd much rather have that 22 year old with passion who's been programming since he was 12, than the 25 year old who has been programming since he learned in his junior year of university that he could make good money changing from Art History to MIS.
  - gaius 15y ago
    Quite, but that kind of programming I would expect to see in this "Hobbies & Interests" section of a CV, not in the "Experience" section.
  - arctangent 15y ago
    I agree with you. On balance, one hour of passionate programming is surely worth as much as a full day of programming that you're paid to do.
beseku 15y ago
I think you're showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what working within a team means. Full time experience interacting with other people and with stakeholders of the product you are creating is something you're friend won't have, regardless of how amazing she is with RoR. Being a developer is as much about being able to write code as being able to identify the best solutions to problems within the particular domain. This ability can only come through working as a developer and dealing with these situations first hand. Put another way, I've been called very rude names by very famous musicians and being able to deal with that and continue working with these people was a massive learning experience to me.
- robryan 15y ago
  Then you weigh in favour of those that aren't very good developers but are good at navigating office politics.
  - uniclaude 15y ago
    There is a real difference between being able to work in a team, and "being good at navigating office politics". When you want some software shipped, you don't only need good programmers, you need good programmers that can work together, and fulltime experience helps with this. That said, I do not think fulltime employment is the only way to get this subset of abilities.
  - beseku 15y ago
    I don't think I mentioned office politics once in my response. If you regard all communication in your office as 'office politics' you are probably going about things in a less than optimal way. A 'good developer' is someone who can speak to his team, his bosses and if exposed, the stakeholders, to identify the problem and be able to identify any potential hurdles or roadblocks that may pop up. All of this is learning to be a good communicator, (not politician), learning that your tools have limitations and learning how to manage peoples expectations and understand that what they ask for isn't what they actually want. For what its worth, your post is an oxymoron - you can't be a 'good developer' without the above. You might be able to code but you aren't a developer.
iam 15y ago
Yeah, I had the same problem with that article. I have a friend who has at least 15+ years of programming experience (including paid contracting), but only 3 years out of college working "full time" for a salary. So that means he's in the 1-5 years bucket automatically? Sorry, but I don't think so, since he can run circles around most 20+ experience people. There's just no comparison between people like that who do programming in their spare time since they were a kid and people who just started programming in college and only did it for school or their jobs. It's absurd to rank them the same.
deleted 15y ago
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gaius 15y ago

That's not unreasonable. Working as a professional programmer means a) understanding and solving other people's problems and b) operating under constraints not of your own choosing c) for 8 or more hours a day. That is relevant experience. I sometimes interview 22-year-olds who claim to have 10+ years experience...

slindsey 15y ago
"I sometimes interview 22-year-olds who claim to have 10+ years experience..." I agree with your sentiment and they certainly shouldn't present themselves as having 10+ years experience. But similarly, people doing the hiring need to consider this. I'd much rather have that 22 year old with passion who's been programming since he was 12, than the 25 year old who has been programming since he learned in his junior year of university that he could make good money changing from Art History to MIS.
- gaius 15y ago
  Quite, but that kind of programming I would expect to see in this "Hobbies & Interests" section of a CV, not in the "Experience" section.
- arctangent 15y ago
  I agree with you. On balance, one hour of passionate programming is surely worth as much as a full day of programming that you're paid to do.

beseku 15y ago

I think you're showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what working within a team means. Full time experience interacting with other people and with stakeholders of the product you are creating is something you're friend won't have, regardless of how amazing she is with RoR. Being a developer is as much about being able to write code as being able to identify the best solutions to problems within the particular domain. This ability can only come through working as a developer and dealing with these situations first hand. Put another way, I've been called very rude names by very famous musicians and being able to deal with that and continue working with these people was a massive learning experience to me.

robryan 15y ago
Then you weigh in favour of those that aren't very good developers but are good at navigating office politics.
- uniclaude 15y ago
  There is a real difference between being able to work in a team, and "being good at navigating office politics". When you want some software shipped, you don't only need good programmers, you need good programmers that can work together, and fulltime experience helps with this. That said, I do not think fulltime employment is the only way to get this subset of abilities.
- beseku 15y ago
  I don't think I mentioned office politics once in my response. If you regard all communication in your office as 'office politics' you are probably going about things in a less than optimal way. A 'good developer' is someone who can speak to his team, his bosses and if exposed, the stakeholders, to identify the problem and be able to identify any potential hurdles or roadblocks that may pop up. All of this is learning to be a good communicator, (not politician), learning that your tools have limitations and learning how to manage peoples expectations and understand that what they ask for isn't what they actually want. For what its worth, your post is an oxymoron - you can't be a 'good developer' without the above. You might be able to code but you aren't a developer.

iam 15y ago

Yeah, I had the same problem with that article. I have a friend who has at least 15+ years of programming experience (including paid contracting), but only 3 years out of college working "full time" for a salary. So that means he's in the 1-5 years bucket automatically? Sorry, but I don't think so, since he can run circles around most 20+ experience people. There's just no comparison between people like that who do programming in their spare time since they were a kid and people who just started programming in college and only did it for school or their jobs. It's absurd to rank them the same.

deleted 15y ago

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