[arcbyte]

What blows my mind is how are companies turning you down? You have 20 years of experience. You can do literally anything. It's crazy that companies are so broken they pick subpar candidates over you, even at similar compensation levels.

[ejb999]

>>You have 20 years of experience.

That means nothing (and I say that as someone with much more than 20 years of experience) - unless all that experience is in exactly the area the hiring company wants - someone with 20 years of the wrong experience (cobol for example) is going to be passed over for someone with 3 years of javascript experience, if you are looking for a JS developer. You probably won't even get passed the HR person if the skills and keywords on your resume don't line up exactly.

[killjoywashere]

My wife just hired someone with 36 years of experience. She is probably not getting past the 90-day probationary period. 1) Too many opinions, 2) no breadth: more like one year of experience repeated 36 times.

[phil21]

The absolute best and absolute worst people I've worked with so far in my career are the 30+ year veterans.

I've often pondered on this, likely some survivorship biases involved as well.

[seattle_spring]

I've encountered this, in real life and on HN, way too much. Nothing worse than overly opinionated people with a superiority complex to boot.

[baron816]

I would rather work with someone with a lot of opinions than someone with few opinions, even if those opinions are very different from mine. Someone with few opinions isn’t really going to contribute new ideas. They’re not going to foster debate, or try to teach others. They need to not be stubborn though, and willing to go along with a decision that they didn’t support.

[ejb999]

I agree - I like when people disagree with me - as long as either I learn something from them, or they learn something from me - if we both dig in our heels, no one learns anything.

[seattle_spring]

"Digging in heels" is exactly what I mean by being overly opinionated.

[seattle_spring]

It's not about the quantity of opinions, it's the strength for which they are held. I'm talking about people whose ways are set in stone, and if you don't agree they'll whine about kids these days or newfangled things like jQuery. Using an intentionally outdated library to represent how absolutely behind the person in question tends to be.

[arcbyte]

I get it, but at the same time, there's not really anything new in computer science for the run of the mill enterprise developer. We're paying massive, massive complexity penalties to get a little bit of gain in productivity in only a few areas. React is a great example. High complexity to the same thing we used to do in SSR but in the browser just to find out we probably want to keep doing SSR in most cases. Was the 10 year battle we've been fighting on front end toolchain worth it? Depends on whether you fought it or you just inherited the results. If you fought it, you were dumb.

[throwaway14356]

be as stuborn and as easy as the situation requires

[RhysU]

#1 and #2 feel like a contradiction. Does the individual have the same opinion too often? Lots of distinct opinions suggests (some) breadth.

[killjoywashere]

I'm not the expert, my wife is, and she has been around. I'm in government so she has had to get all sorts of jobs in different settings and now has a demonstrably broad resume, but with that breadth has come depth. She attracts the highest-end clientele in the world (CEOs of companies you know and love) and can afford to be choosy about which clients she takes on. What I get from my wife is that, this lady keeps proposing the same set of ideas, which are clearly drawn from her one specific job, which she held for 36 years.

They are repetitive and frequently off the mark. A client has issue A, and she strongly advocates for solution B1. A client has issue B, and she strongly advocates for solution B2. A client has issue C, and she strongly advocates for solution B3. A client has issue D, and she strongly advocates for solution B2 again.

She lacks the knowledge to access solution spaces A, C, and D.

[abalashov]

Wouldn't #2 be better described as "no depth"?

[killjoywashere]

No, she knows that one year, really well.

[gedy]

A lot of companies don't want or need strong engineers, even ones that claim they do. They want cheap worker bees to do the Jira tickets without question.

[treve]

A less dire way to express this is that companies have needs for devs at different levels of experience. Very experienced people are going to be bored and feel unchallenged doing work that's not appropriate for their level.

[swagasaurus-rex]

In larger companies, hiring decisions is made by managers with a career agenda and projects in mind.

People who will bring new ideas, rock the boat, offer to do the same task but in an easier way... Don't make good peons for these managers.

That's why Microsoft loves contractors. Contractors will do what they're told and have very little leverage. Empire-building managers there can easily control their contractor work force even if speed and sometimes quality is sacrificed.

[rboyd]

seems like there's a thin line between "This person would be a valuable contributor / I could learn a lot from working with this person" and "This person threatens my own career progression", especially towards the staff+ roles

[psychphysic]

Hell kill it I've they're looking for people with 20year experience.

But most jobs are looking for 2-10 years.

At 20+ years if you're not headhunted you're kind of screwed.

[satvikpendem]

> You have 20 years of experience.

I've heard it often said that it depends on what kind of experience, not necessarily its length. Someone could have one year of experience twenty times, or be working in old tech and hasn't kept up with modern practices, costs too much to hire, or a myriad of other reasons for not being preferable over greener candidates.

[roflyear]

I work with people who have 20 years of experience and cause more harm than they do good. Experience is not a great indicator of skill in tech, beyond a certain point: like, I'd prefer someone with 2 yrs of experience over someone with 0, but not much preference for someone with 8 yrs over someone with 2.

[GoldenMonkey]

2 years sounds way too junior. For anything mission critical.

[roflyear]

Yeah this is true, cutoff is probably 4 or so.

[primeblue]

What kind of a rotten profession is software engineering that it dismisses more experience.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, builders, architects, brick layers, pilots etc are sought after if they have more experience

[jjav]

A lot of truth to this. It is difficult to think of any profession where the value of experience is less understood than in software engineering.

[pm215]

As somebody who has 20 years of experience: I think I'm pretty good in my specific niche; there's wide areas to the sides of it where even if I haven't done that before I could get up to speed pretty rapidly; and there are some kinds of software work that are so far out of my field that you'd be much better off going for somebody with 2 or 3 years in that area rather than me. Programming is a massive field these days, and it's not all 100% interchangeable.