How many years of experience do you really need?
DHH in Years of irrelevance:
Programming platform experience is like knowing your way around the kitchen. Where are the knives, what size plates do we have, and what spices are available. It's very useful for getting things done without having to search high and low for every little thing. But it's also an asset with a cut-off point of diminished returns. Once you have a reasonably good idea where things are, it's no longer the bottleneck in your culinary performance.
Like chefs, like programmers. Peopleware quotes a study that six months seemed to be the cut-off point for programmers. Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.
That sounds about right to me.
I have to agree. I also think that total years of experience in the software industry plays a huge part in an engineer's knowledge.
However, that's not always true either.
I interviewed a PhD this week that had an incredible amount of experience and knowledge, but all his platform knowledge was dated.
Years of Experience in Software + up-to-date platform knowledge = the world is your oyster.
There's so many intangibles that are very tough, if not impossible, to determine until you work with a person.
- Are they quick and pragmatic learners?
- Are they tenacious googlers? (can they find the answer to get something done without reading the entire manual?)
- Do they freak out if they have to work with a technology that they've not had tons of experience with?
- Are they good enough to know when something about the process or some requirement or some other unpredictable thing isn't going right? (This is a feeling a lot of the time, so very difficult to measure and identify IMO. Essentially, are they able to identify non-ideal situations and speak up instead of floundering and wasting time and money?)
Posted by Bryan on February 06, 2008 at 11:39 AM MST #
Posted by Andy Carlson on February 12, 2008 at 05:12 PM MST #