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I agree with one caveat: the degree to which more experience means more productive depends to a large extent on two factors: 1) The experience. 2) The job. Ha

I agree with one caveat: the degree to which more experience means more productive depends to a large extent on two factors: 1) The experience. 2) The job. Having 10 years hacking on one system probably won't make you anymore productive than 3. At that point you're a factory worker, and you can't only put so much expertise into flipping a few switches and following traces. However, having 20 years of diverse technical experience will make you more productive than 15 if the job requires the breadth you've developed. I'm 12 years in and have moved into Startups for just that reason. You get to learn more numerous things, and you get to use all of them. I've been at my current job 6 months and I've worked with 4 languages, more libraries than I can count, 2 third parties, blah blah blah. If I went back in time even 3 years of experience, I would definitely be less effective. If I went back 5, I'd be struggling.

base698 5y ago
Often said as, you can have 10 years of experience or 10 one year experiences.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  This ignore the immense amount of overlap various systems have, and the benefits of cross-pollination you get from the parts that don't. Even if you work on a completely different system every year, by that tenth year, you'll be up and running faster, and probably have something to teach the people who've been working on that system longer than you.
bcrosby95 5y ago
I work for a small company, and one of the things I enjoy is we're always spinning up new ideas to see if they work. We tend to spend half time on new stuff and half time on maintenance. This has given me a lot of exposure to different things over the years. It's mostly web stuff, but one of the more interesting ones was interfacing with hardware for a warehouse app that we built to make the shipping process less error prone and more efficient.

base698 5y ago

Often said as, you can have 10 years of experience or 10 one year experiences.

BobbyJo 5y ago
This ignore the immense amount of overlap various systems have, and the benefits of cross-pollination you get from the parts that don't. Even if you work on a completely different system every year, by that tenth year, you'll be up and running faster, and probably have something to teach the people who've been working on that system longer than you.

bcrosby95 5y ago

I work for a small company, and one of the things I enjoy is we're always spinning up new ideas to see if they work. We tend to spend half time on new stuff and half time on maintenance. This has given me a lot of exposure to different things over the years. It's mostly web stuff, but one of the more interesting ones was interfacing with hardware for a warehouse app that we built to make the shipping process less error prone and more efficient.