Ask HN: Why is it that more experienced candidates get paid more?

[pinkunicorn]

At the place where I work, it looks like more the number of years you've put in the corporate industry, the better your salary negotiation. I don't understand why this disparity exists. For instance, in my opinion, I've done way better work than a colleague of mine who is easily getting paid almost 1.5 times more than what I get paid. It is to be said that he has 4 years industry experience while I've only 1. Is this the case with most tech companies?

[greenyoda]

You might be able to write excellent code, but experience brings many other skills:

- How to design code that's easy to use, test, understand, and maintain over the long term.

- How to effectively debug the hardest problems: bugs that occur intermittently, concurrency issues, performance issues, hardware issues, etc.

- How to wade into a huge code base and understand what it's doing, especially when the people who wrote it are no longer around to answer questions.

- How to decide which third-party software is likely to be well-supported a couple of years from now, or whether it's more cost-effective to write certain functionality yourself or use an existing solution.

- How to work effectively with others: difficult co-workers, customer support, product management, your manager, upper management.

A lot of this stuff is learned by making lots of mistakes over time. If you're just starting out, you haven't made enough mistakes yet to have learned the hard lessons.

[stray]

It should be.

It's difficult to see the value of experience until you have it. Because you don't know yet what it is you're looking at.

I'm sure you'd agree that you're a better driver today than you were at 16. Most people would. But at 16, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

It simply takes time to get good at anything.

It's like that in every field of endeavor.

[smt88]

It's because experience makes you more valuable, whether you're super smart and skilled or not.

I used to think I did "good" work when I had only 1 year in the industry. Now I have 10 and write code in some ways I would have scorned when I started out.

You have no idea right now how much better you'll get and how you'll change in the next few years.