3 ms·

This assumes that experience is more important than skills. An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a pr

This assumes that experience is more important than skills. An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a programmer with average intelligence who phones it in.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> This assumes that experience is more important than skills. No, it doesn't. It just means that the word "senior" measures experience, not skills, and is frequently misused. It's fine to prefer a super skilled junior, and smart companies do that all the time. But that doesn't somehow make them senior, and failing to understand the distinction is a significant problem for hiring. . > An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a programmer with average intelligence who phones it in. My experience in industry and my personal viewpoint is that actually lazy programmers tend to be the best. They don't over-engineer things, and they write their tests, because they know it's better to spend an hour now than five hours next month. My experience is that smart and motivated people tend to fall on the Knuth side, and not the McIlroy side, of More Shell Less Egg, and this is not what I personally want. https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ Anyway, this is all irrelevant in my opinion. We can hem and haw until the cows come home about who's going to be a good programmer, what styles we prefer, what candidates we prefer, and who knows, maybe one of us will get lucky and say something correct one day. Most people never do. :) In the meantime, these words formally refer to years of experience, and if you want to focus on their skillset, then read their list of skills, instead. The standard resume has not just an explicit list of skills but also how they were used in previous jobs, and this doesn't come up this way at all outside of hiring. It's a concreted matter; you can look it up in HR textbooks, and in government jobs it's a matter of law. Similarly, their education isn't about their skillset, but it's important, and it should be on the resume. (Originally that said "phone number" in the hope of being funny, but it came off as sarcastic.) Yes, skills are very probably the most important thing you can find on a resume about a person you're going to hire, and almost the most important thing about them in general (behind honesty and workplace toxicity.) But also other things are important too, and not every single thing on the resume needs to be about skill level. When I want to know years' experience, there are other reasons I want to know that, beyond their skillset. It'll have a lot to do with whether they know how to document, how to gather requirements, how to write plans, how to contact stakeholders, how to push back against bad decisions, how to communicate schedule slips, how to make themselves available. Yes, skills matter a lot, but also, the stuff under years of experience do too, and there needs to be a way to communicate that. If I had the magic staff-reader wand, and two candidates, and it said "super skilled junior" and "average senior," there are actually times where I would prefer the latter. Not a ton of them, but also not zero. Don't co-opt everything towards skills, or you'll blind yourself towards other important topics.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

> This assumes that experience is more important than skills. No, it doesn't. It just means that the word "senior" measures experience, not skills, and is frequently misused. It's fine to prefer a super skilled junior, and smart companies do that all the time. But that doesn't somehow make them senior, and failing to understand the distinction is a significant problem for hiring. . > An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a programmer with average intelligence who phones it in. My experience in industry and my personal viewpoint is that actually lazy programmers tend to be the best. They don't over-engineer things, and they write their tests, because they know it's better to spend an hour now than five hours next month. My experience is that smart and motivated people tend to fall on the Knuth side, and not the McIlroy side, of More Shell Less Egg, and this is not what I personally want. https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ Anyway, this is all irrelevant in my opinion. We can hem and haw until the cows come home about who's going to be a good programmer, what styles we prefer, what candidates we prefer, and who knows, maybe one of us will get lucky and say something correct one day. Most people never do. :) In the meantime, these words formally refer to years of experience, and if you want to focus on their skillset, then read their list of skills, instead. The standard resume has not just an explicit list of skills but also how they were used in previous jobs, and this doesn't come up this way at all outside of hiring. It's a concreted matter; you can look it up in HR textbooks, and in government jobs it's a matter of law. Similarly, their education isn't about their skillset, but it's important, and it should be on the resume. (Originally that said "phone number" in the hope of being funny, but it came off as sarcastic.) Yes, skills are very probably the most important thing you can find on a resume about a person you're going to hire, and almost the most important thing about them in general (behind honesty and workplace toxicity.) But also other things are important too, and not every single thing on the resume needs to be about skill level. When I want to know years' experience, there are other reasons I want to know that, beyond their skillset. It'll have a lot to do with whether they know how to document, how to gather requirements, how to write plans, how to contact stakeholders, how to push back against bad decisions, how to communicate schedule slips, how to make themselves available. Yes, skills matter a lot, but also, the stuff under years of experience do too, and there needs to be a way to communicate that. If I had the magic staff-reader wand, and two candidates, and it said "super skilled junior" and "average senior," there are actually times where I would prefer the latter. Not a ton of them, but also not zero. Don't co-opt everything towards skills, or you'll blind yourself towards other important topics.