[satysin]

Agreed ‘years of experience’ is a crap measure. I’ve interviewed people that put 20+ years Linux experience on their C.V. yet knew nothing about grub or systemd (as examples).

When pressed just a little bit turns out they installed Debian or such back in 2001 then used Linux on and off/now and then over the years. Often not even going beyond the live install environment.

Same thing with programming languages. 20+ years of C++ experience doesn’t mean anything by itself. I’ve worked people with one year experience that are far more experienced in actually using the language and delivering high quality code.

It’s just bullshit gatekeeping and laziness mostly by HR or non-technical managers.

[weatherlite]

Surely on average, all else being equal - a 20+ year C++ vet would be better than a 1 year C++ programmer, no? Are you saying experience simply doesn't measure anything in programming? I mean I'm a decent programmer but I do mostly Ruby and web stuff. I don't think I'm gonna be that great in C++ compared to most 20 year old veterans.

[satysin]

You would think so but in my personal experience people massively over estimate how competent they are in a language. Even more so when they haven't actually used it in a while (let's say >1 year).

IMHO blindly asking for N+ years experience is a waste of time and puts a lot of people off applying for the position that may be a great fit but feel they are not experienced enough.

[weatherlite]

> people massively over estimate how competent they are in a language.

Or maybe they were just really mediocre? I can compare myself to myself - I simply know that I'm a better Rubyist than I was 7 years ago. Not just a better Rubyist, a better software developer in general. But sure I can see that maybe some people don't have a passion for the craft and then they kinda stop learning and just get by with what they know. You can continue being mediocre for quite a long time if you can bullshit people - but I don't think that's a typical type in our industry. So I do think your experience is anecdotal. The really great Rubyists I know all have lots of experience - at least 5 years and usually it's well over a decade (I'm thinking of Tenderlove/Jeremy Evans/Sam Saffron etc etc). Btw they're not just great Rubyists they also understand software, the web and even low level stuff quite well, so they're great overall engineers. Sure some bright people can get to that level faster - but that's very rare for mere mortals. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time usually, like any skill.

I will say though that for many routine tasks you don't have to really be senior - e.g implement some new end point that talks to a model where you pretty much copy paste from the existing code base, for these types of tasks there won't be much of a discernable difference between a junior-mid and a senior. Senior make a difference in the more complex stuff.