[Nursie]

> A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience

As a developer with 20 years experience ... I'm a lot better at what I do than I was ten years ago. Better at seeing how it relates to the business I'm working with, more productive in ways that are not just LoC.

I'd be OK if I can sustain my current income... but I'd still like to take the step to being more of a consultant. I'm dancing on the edges of it now, between contractor and consultant.

[JamesBarney]

How much better? What are you doing now that you weren't doing 10 years ago that is a real game changer in terms of value?

As an architect/tech lead I'm much better than I was 5 years ago. I know how to manage engineering practices and when/how to apply them, better how to design a systems, and how to better manage relationships/politics so that I can leverage my experience into actual implementation and design.

But as an individual contributor I don't think I'm a whole lot more valuable unless it's in a domain I have deep experience in like real-time.

[Nursie]

> How much better?

That's very hard to say.

> What are you doing now that you weren't doing 10 years ago that is a real game changer in terms of value?

Technical leadership on teams of developers. Mentoring and enabling younger team members. Having more cogent ideas about tooling and delivery, having more well formed ideas about delivering the product my client needs, not prioritising doing things in technically interesting ways. Managing upwards/sideways when I encounter problems in product ownership and similar posts. Teasing out requirements where these are incomplete. A lot of things.

I'm also more confident in tackling larger problems, and understand more about the big picture, from kernel to front end.

Much of this is incremental, of course.

> But as an individual contributor I don't think I'm a whole lot more valuable unless it's in a domain I have deep experience in like real-time.

Are those things you mentioned not part of your individual contribution? They don't translate directly to LoC, but they likely to contribute directly to faster, simpler delivery of what the client needs.

[JamesBarney]

Yeah most of the things you've mentioned you've gotten better are the things I've noticed too. On smaller team that I run or am in a sr. position it seems to make a big difference. But on larger teams(100+) where I'm just plugged in as staff augmentation it makes a smaller difference.

Sometimes your job is just transforming fairly well articulated requirements into code and on these I notice I haven't gotten a lot better than I was 4-5 years ago.

[scarface74]

And that’s another line of reasoning I don’t believe.

I have a coworker who is probably 10 years younger than I am but has been working for the company for 7 years to my one, how could I better understand the business of the company than he does?

I worked for one company when I was 35 dealing with the complicated rules of the railroad industry. My manager was 28, but he was the founder of the company before it got acquired, built it from scratch and had 90% penetration in the particular market segment, how could I be more experience at how my code relates to the business - one he studied since he graduated from college?

[rpedela]

You can always find examples that counter the generalization but don't necessarily make the generalization false. In general, a 40 year old is going to be better than a 25 year old in understanding how software is applicable to business simply because they have more experience. They have been in more business meetings and seen how their software applies. Does that mean a 25 year old can't be better than a 40 year old at that? Of course not.

[scarface74]

It's not just one random counterexample. Knowing how code relates to a business has a lot more to do with how long you have been in that particular business or vertical than your general experience.

That 25 year old who was at the company since they started 3 years ago is going to know a lot more than that 40 year old who just came in yesterday.

Besides that, I did say 10+ years. The whole point is diminishing returns from experience.

[AnimalMuppet]

There's more to this than understanding the business.

With 20 years of experience, I didn't write the bugs I did 10 years earlier. I produced better architectures. I produced more readable code. I could tackle more complex problems. I could help my coworkers more.

[Nursie]

> I have a coworker who is probably 10 years younger than I am but has been working for the company for 7 years to my one, how could I better understand the business of the company than he does?

You probably don't understand the specific business domain better. That's not the claim. But you may better/faster understand the clients you have and how to meet their needs, how to interpret their requirements, spot the gaps in what they're asking for, etc

[scarface74]

My next resume

Summary

- Expert at solving XYProblems

[edmundsauto]

One explanation could be that having more experience in a wide variety of fields brings perspective that someone steeped deeply in the business, but with very little external breadth, has.

Not that I necessarily think that's true. Personally, I have yet to be convinced that it's possible to systematically measure developer productivity, making all of these comparisons pretty worthless except as "dorm room at 2am" type conversations.