[sokoloff]

> if I'm looking at a CV for someone with 10 years of experience and they have changed jobs every year or two, I will suspect that they are missing some pretty important experience as a senior developer.

I call this the "one year of experience, ten times" phenomenon.

[UK-AL]

Ironically I find the developers, who have stayed at company for 10 years the worst for this. They've been maintaining the same product, for similar requests for the past years. Doing the exact same thing.

Moving to different employers means you get a wider experience of different technologies.

[restalis]

There may also be a big project that takes years of development, with each completed part serving as a prerequisite for a new one. It's hard to judge one's career from a face value unless the CV explicitly states details like "X years sunk in product maintenance".

[jaclaz]

>I call this the "one year of experience, ten times" phenomenon.

As a side note, I always find funny reading "Our team has 20 years of combined experience in ..." as if a two people team with 10 years each was the same thing as 20 people with one year each.

[tcfunk]

I don't think that's really accurate or fair.

In my experience, you learn very different things in every workplace. Could be a different language or framework. Could even just be a different team arrangement or workflow.

Bottom line is this: if you feel like you're not learning and growing in your current environment, why stay? Better yet, why would anyone expect you to stay?

[sokoloff]

I agree (that it's more funny than perfectly descriptively fair). The point is that a lot of people with 10 years' experience aren't necessarily more valuable than those with 3 years' experience.

There's a steep initial ramp of learning that can readily plateau out if someone is complacent or actively disinterested in learning new things.

[restalis]

3 years' experience may sound sufficient only if we're talking about something very narrow and/or confusing "getting aquatinted with" with "mastering" something, otherwise you don't have to go to 10 years - you'll sense the difference even between 3 years' and 5 years' worth of experience.