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"years of experience" basically means nothing, both for people and organisations. You can work with someone who has 30 years experience who knows nothing, and someone with 1-2 years who's practically an expert.

Joined a large multi-national fresh out of college, that had been around for +90 years. I expected them to know software development inside and out. Didn't expect to see so many failed projects for stupid reasons, so many over sights, so many .... morons, to be honest.

Worked for a startup company where most only had 1 or 2 years more experience than me and learned so much.

Worked for a small company where everyone had 1.5 - 2 times my experience, where I learned the meaning of "bewilderment".

Never feel small, or less valuable because of a number. Theres a good chance you are working with jackasses - practiseSafeHex

Comments
  • 10
    Preach! I knew a guy in uni with zero industry experience who did projects a whole team does outside of uni.
  • 4
    @Nanos bullshit. We have poorly to mediocre performing techs with work aniversaries going over 20+ years.

    Getting somebody fired for performance is so much paperwork it happened only once in my 9 years here (center with 1000+ heads).

    It's also part of the reason why any major change is slow - unwillingnes, resistance, status quo maintenance.

    Welcome to corporate.
  • 6
    @Nanos that’s not true at all. Getting fired for writing shit code is just something that barely ever happened at any point.

    Worked for large multi nationals with over 100k staff. Extremely common to find people with +30 years in the company who’ve not got a clue. Because they’ve never fired people, shit devs just decide to just become “lifers” and coast through their days.

    One of these lifer guys was put on our team after his previous team shut down. He had no relevant experience of any kind for our team. He couldn’t figure out modern IDE’s or text editors and refused to do anything other than write code in Microsoft word!!! He produced about 1% of the code that everyone else did.

    He couldn’t be fired, so they just found somewhere to put him, regardless of what impact that has.
  • 1
    Not everyone's year is the same. Hours of a better metric.

    If you spent 10 years at a web dev shop but only put in 2,000 hours of web dev, you're going to be worse than the guy who was there for 3 years but did 10,000 hours.
  • 1
    @lungdart On average there are 261 work days per year. 261*8 = 2088 hours. 10k hours per 3 years is around 12.8 hours daily.

    (i know the 10k was just a figurative example, but was curious about the daily workload for such case)
  • 0
    @Nanos in no way shape or form does "these days" equate to 50 years. "These days" as a term means "the present". 50 years ago is not the present
  • 2
    "[ ... ] "years of experience" basically means nothing, both for people and organisations. You can work with someone who has 30 years experience who knows nothing, and someone with 1-2 years who's practically an expert. [ ... ] "

    You summed up my existential work crisis in one sentence. I love you.

    The big problem about telling that at my young age is: it makes me look like I'm presumptuous.
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