YoE Debate — What does it mean to you?
So, as a wallflower here (and a sde/architect/consultant in the industry) I’ve noticed an unnatural resistance for people to move away from the concept of “years of experience” being an optimal metric as opposed to legitimate merit. I’m looking for some healthy debate for someone to change my mind or for me to hopefully change many others. My perspective: yoe is just a metric aging workers hold onto to feel like they haven’t wasted their lives and to feel secure in their positions from the increasingly more skilled graduating generations. With that said, I’m not completely ignorant to the role experience plays in high risk situations or when shit hits the fan. However, I’ve run the gamut of roles where companies “thought” they wanted 5-10+ years of experience, but my 1-3 were just fine. My perspective is that what should truly be gauged is the Quality of experience and raw talent of the individual. I’ve worked with plenty of senior/principal sde’s, architects, etc. with my lifetime worth of experience who hadn’t learned anything new in the past decade and forgot everything useful they’d learned in the first one. Can we start speaking in terms of QoE instead of YoE? I know it’s a little harder on the managers out there who will have to actually know exactly what you’re looking for instead of assuming the older the better (which is false 90% of the time nowadays), but it simply makes better business sense. Let’s go. TC: $140k YoE: 3 EDIT: So we can be transparent in our biases, please include at least your YoE in any comments!
How do you measure QoE? Can you measure that in a 5 hours interview? You mentioned in the description that with experience you know how to resolve things when shit hits the fan. I do agree there are lot so senior devs who don't put in effort to stay relevant to present day tech. That is definitely not acceptable according to me. If senior dev is keeping up with latest dev, the senior probably has a broader perspective on things. What you expect from senior devs is mentorship and not necessarily in depth knowledge about one specific subject. Leaders don't have to be better than their reports, they should be capable of helping everyone is the team to become leaders.
The measuring of QoE is in fact difficult - as it should be when evaluating any professional. YoE is just low hanging fruit for inept evaluators to me. If we both worked at the same company - me for 2 years, you for 20 - on the same team, you might have been exposed to much more than me, sure. But your COBOL and mainframe exposure has absolutely no weight going forward with a modernized company and should not be considered valuable “experience” anymore than one might consider Microsoft Excel skills crucial to a full stack dev. The key in measuring QoE lies in having extremely talented interviewers who are capable of digging deep and seeing through the bs of someone who just rested and vested vs someone who continually provided value over the course of their career, evolving as a professional as they did. Mentorship is indeed a valuable point from senior team leaders, but if a company needs work done, should they not be looking to have many fewer mentors than mentees? Too many chiefs in the tribe never ended well.
I agree with your points about getting rid of people who rest and vest. I also agree with the point that interviews should be more than just leetcode. If we both worked at the same company in the scenario you mentioned, my COBOL experience might not be useful but my experience in general will be useful not just in getting the work done but beyond that. I think you are missing the point that senior devs are more than just devs doing the work. Like i said above, if the senior is just slacking the company should get rid of them. Any senior dev is valuable as long as they stay relevant
So, you know everything about how YoE is a completely useless metric after 3 years of professional experience? Try working with some 20+ year industry veterans who can code circles around you and let me know how you feel then. That said, YoE by itself is, indeed, pretty useless, but it’s a decent benchmark to start with when all you have is a resume to look at.
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I’ve worked with several dinosaurs, at several different Fortune 1000s (I’ve jumped around frequently to gather as much experience as possible). My point is this: why do people insist that it takes an entire year to grow? I’m not so conceited to say I’ve never gotten help or learned something from my seniors. Tbh I knew close to nothing relevant coming out of college with $60k in debt. However, it took me less than a year to absorb knowledge from about 7 20+ YoE professionals across multiple domains of IT before I could do all of their jobs better and *faster* than them. You don’t need to be exposed to something for years to be good at it. QoE is a measurement of just that. If I see two individuals who say they know Django like the back of their hand, I want to see what they’ve done with it. If one has 20+ YoE, I want to see that they’ve done something significant with this purported prowess. If all they’ve done is ride the same desk for 20 years on the same team, they’re frankly inadequate. You can’t have learned an appropriate amount working on a single team or even in a single company in many cases within a single industry. Quality to me shows through adaptability and speed. Who cares if you’re an expert in one thing that you’ve done your entire life (let’s say Java)? If I hire somebody, I want proof that, should technology demand, they can become an expert in anything else TOMORROW. Not in another 20 years when I’ve retired.
More skilled graduating generation... Excuse me.. more skilled at what? Leetcoding pycoders?
More skilled in emerging technologies that many professionals don’t take the time to learn because they’re too busy working for a living. I don’t consider myself a recent grad at this point, though I’m sure many ancient ones do. However, I have no issue acknowledging that new grads have some skillsets and exposures that I don’t, simply because they’re not relevant to my job - the focus of my world at any given moment. You can’t tell me you’re an expert in every emerging tech there is if you’ve been stuck on a team working a Java, Spring, REST/SOAP environment for 8 years. Why would you ever have been exposed to GraphQL or Kotlin if your company’s stack “works” and they’re ok becoming legacy? If your boss doesn’t want it, you don’t do it. You might try and plead your case if you’re hungry for continuous growth or a really good employee who values keeping their company progressive. But 9 times out of 10, you deliver what is ordered, and in a typical environment that order is static and redundant. You start on a team doing Java, 10 years later you’re a senior, guess what...I bet you’re still doing Java and never touched Python outside of an overdressed Bash script. Then the like go on with their “years” of “experience” and earned “title” to become a senior ML dev, working Python and Tensorflow, and move at a snail’s pace compared to the kid who just graduated doing it 2 years straight in college. My point isn’t to say the new grad is a “better” dev. There’s a much more holistic picture obviously, but they can very easily be a better fit for a senior development position
QYoE < = YoE YoE matters. And it shows during interviews and technical discussions. Also, I have had many occasions where I was interviewed by <3 years exp interviewer and they only knew of one way of solving a problem.
I agree that inexperienced interviewers are a drag. But I’ve been interviewed by professionals with 15+ YoE who couldn’t hold a real technical conversation with me. Architects who have never heard of application security. Devs who have never touched a database. Infrastructure teams who don’t know how to compile an app. QoE is the compression of whatever is expected of YoE. Show me that you did in 1 year what this other slacker took 10 to do. That’s real quality. Businesses are about speed to value as much as they are quality. If it takes you 6 months to build “perfectly” what some kid can build “good enough” in 2 weeks, guess who I’m hiring? And when it breaks 10 times, he/she can fix it within an hour each time? I just saved my company 5.5 months of idle salary. And now the dev is even more experienced by those breaks and on their next project will be dishing out code closer to your “perfection” in still a fraction of the time.
How I read it - a cocky fresh grad who thinks he has learned everything that is here to learn and looks down on “aging” peers. Think about someone like yourself but who had 10x more time to learn more stuff and improve on any axis you can think of. Come back in 20 years and tell me if you still feel the same way.
I’ve noticed no one wants to post their YoE so far in this thread. Usually it’s worn like a badge of honor. Could it be you’re taking offense because you feel entitled by your age? I’m far from cocky and acknowledge there are plenty of people smarter than me or on my level..but they don’t have to have put in tons of years under their belt to get there. I’ve met the individual you speak of, but you’ve also probably never been out east (where I live). I’m not referring to purely valley companies, I’m referring to the larger IT industry, where majority of professionals work - the “rest of the world”. And believe it or not, out here there are devs and architects with 15+ YoE begging for my help on the regular and unable to solve issues for days and weeks that take me minutes. I’m not saying I’m “just that great”. I’m saying the industry is just that flawed. Because those seniors should’ve never been put into their positions based purely on their age. Sitting around collecting a check in a certain environment for years isn’t enough to warrant a promotion, raise, or any leg up in a job evaluation.
I have 20+ yoe. I do see all the time how much better I can do things from coding to design to XFN to mentoring to anything else really comparing to fresh grads. I think your conclusions are coming from selection bias in the “larger IT industry” - the top talent either moves to management or moves to tier 1 and 2 companies as its relatively uncommon for people to keep progressing on IC tracks out there. So what’s left is mostly (not always!) gray matter and coasters who age instead of maturing.
It's more complicated than that. Yes - there is a lot of value in being a fast learner and, in many cases, someone smart can pick things up quickly and run with it. However, there is still a big advantage to what someone can learn with many years in the industry. It just means that they had the opportunity to actually try (and sometimes fail) in more area than someone more junior. There is a big difference between reading (and understanding) the text book answer and going through the process and experiencing it for yourself. For an employer, it just means that they got those failures and learning (that other employers already paid for) in that new employee. That's why I wouldn't trust extremely.smart and talented people that are relatively new to the industry to be the architect of a new system or to lead the way in a completely new space. Needless to say, a mediocre engineer with 20 years of experience will turn into a... drum roll - experienced mediocre engineer. A strong engineer with that level of experience, however, can turn into the key employee for a company. Something to add - yoe can sometimes make thing more difficult for people. While you can join as a junior engineer in at the beginning of your career, someone with 10+ year experience meeting the bar of an e3 or e4 in fb just wont get an offer... Yoe: >10
You make a really strong point there about YoE holding people back. I can’t say I haven’t seen it happen once before when someone appeared “overqualified” on paper but performed at a significantly lower level during their interview - one that might’ve been acceptable were they a fresh grad. So it can definitely be a two-way street. I also understand your hesitation around the notion of entrusting a really smart, talented newby to ground-up systems design/architecture. There’s a higher probability they haven’t encountered every edge case that someone more seasoned in the industry has. However, I’m approaching this from the perspective of condensed learning. Let’s say you encountered 50 unique troubleshooting incidents building out serverless architectures in your 10 year run. Who’s to say candidate B hasn’t run into 50+ in her single year of running the gamut of startups or candidate C hasn’t during his 4 years consulting Fortune 500s? My case is that time is relative and a very skewed indicator of what has been accomplished within it is often presumed based on one’s own experience. I’ve found that some 15+ YoE architects appear insurmountable in knowledge when I compare myself to them. Others with the same YoE I feel like couldn’t hold their own next to me a year ago, let alone now. The fact that the metric of YoE and the actually talent/skill of the individual can vary so significantly is what I’m driving home here as the reason it’s a severely flawed metric. It simply doesn’t hold its weight for what it’s used for. It *can*, but it’s far from a guarantee by any means. One would be just as lucky to gamble based on race, gender, religion, or creed.
I hate the YOE measurement... especially when they say, "We are looking for someone with 10+ years with React." .....React was open sourced 6 years ago 😒