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You can have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. This is a good adage for why 'time served' is not a particularly useful way to

You can have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. This is a good adage for why 'time served' is not a particularly useful way to judge someone's level of experience, but you can't invert it and say it means time served isn't important at all. Someone with 1 year of experience might have the same experience level of someone with 10 * 1 year, but they obviously don't have the same experience as someone with 10 years of real experience. "You can have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times." is only useful as a way of differentiating between two candidates with 10 years experience; it can't be used to suggest someone with 1 year of experience is as experienced as someone with 10 years. They're only as experienced as the bad 10 years experience.

dijit 5y ago
I think that's completely fair, but are we really talking about people with 1 year of experience as if they have 10 years? I'm not saying experience doesn't matter at all, just saying that it's a poor marker for seniority. FWIW when hiring I tend to avoid thinking about years of experience; else I allow some implicit ageism into my assessment; my definition of senior has very little to do with actual technologies and is more to do with how you use those technologies and if you have experience being self-motivated to deliver something with business value.
- adriand 5y ago
  > I'm not saying experience doesn't matter at all, just saying that it's a poor marker for seniority. In many contexts seniority is literally defined as years of service. I take your point to mean that experience isn't everything, and that there are many people with less experience than others but with more talent or skill, but I think there is a reasonable expectation that a senior developer (in terms of years served) ought to have certain qualities that one cannot expect in someone with far fewer years of experience, regardless of how intelligent/skilled/talented they might be. Wisdom is one quality that takes years to arrive at. In a developer, wisdom is the quality that leads to questions like, "Yes, we could do that...but should we?" It's the lived experience of writing enough code that never got used to be able to call YAGNI. It's knowing when to be cautious about adopting new technology, because of all those times someone picked the wrong new thing that they still had to maintain five years later.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes. It's reasonable to say that some people with 15 years of experience won't be qualified for some senior role and others will be. But unless there are really unusual circumstances, you're probably not hiring someone with just a couple years of experience for that role--however well their interview went.

dijit 5y ago

I think that's completely fair, but are we really talking about people with 1 year of experience as if they have 10 years? I'm not saying experience doesn't matter at all, just saying that it's a poor marker for seniority. FWIW when hiring I tend to avoid thinking about years of experience; else I allow some implicit ageism into my assessment; my definition of senior has very little to do with actual technologies and is more to do with how you use those technologies and if you have experience being self-motivated to deliver something with business value.

adriand 5y ago
> I'm not saying experience doesn't matter at all, just saying that it's a poor marker for seniority. In many contexts seniority is literally defined as years of service. I take your point to mean that experience isn't everything, and that there are many people with less experience than others but with more talent or skill, but I think there is a reasonable expectation that a senior developer (in terms of years served) ought to have certain qualities that one cannot expect in someone with far fewer years of experience, regardless of how intelligent/skilled/talented they might be. Wisdom is one quality that takes years to arrive at. In a developer, wisdom is the quality that leads to questions like, "Yes, we could do that...but should we?" It's the lived experience of writing enough code that never got used to be able to call YAGNI. It's knowing when to be cautious about adopting new technology, because of all those times someone picked the wrong new thing that they still had to maintain five years later.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes. It's reasonable to say that some people with 15 years of experience won't be qualified for some senior role and others will be. But unless there are really unusual circumstances, you're probably not hiring someone with just a couple years of experience for that role--however well their interview went.