Mohtalim

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001054.html

Requiring N Years of Experience Considered Harmful?

Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant

Yep dead on. I have been refused interview because of this, and I would say I am one of the best software engineer I have known outside of CMU group.

Years of experience is relevant for knowledge of development process and how to handle workplace issues. But platform experience for good developer is pretty useless.

Peijen is absolutely right.

I wonder if there are ways of teaching how to handle workplace issues on a broader scale. There seems to be a lot of focus on this in the development management track of classes I've been taking lately. A lot of the way that it's taught is through discussing experiences that people have had and throwing in some research along the way to guide what the current state of thinking is and how it has evolved. However, I think that much of this type of learning is ignored, misunderstood, or mis-used by industry. Does anyone know if these are things taught in a typical MBA program? How many engineers really go to get an MBA-like degree? If they do, do they stay technical? Some people understand these issues implicitly or are quick on the uptake when dealing with them, but my experience is that many are not.

This reminds me of

How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/27/2034228

For the record, I agree that years of experience should not be a requirement, but it can be a plus.

More importantly imho, hiring good employees requires good interviewers. Unfortunately, sometimes people that would be good interviewers never get a chance since employers might think it's better to direct charge them to a project, and then they wonder why it's so hard to find quality people... (or perhaps blacklist them for turning down too many candidates)

Case in point, now that there are more rank 5 comments

COMON$ (806135) wrote:A boss of mine once said this:

Class A people hire class A people

Class B people hire class C people

I think that is spot on.

Also appropriate for this thread:

Impy the Impiuos Imp (442658) wrote:I love stuff like "Must have 5 years of Java experience" -- 2 years after Java was released.

I saw the "Must have 15 years of experience developing X", where X was a type of system that had only been around for a few years. Someone claimed it was a scam to allow nepotism. Some manager wanted to hire a specific candidate for a position, but their company didn't allow that. So, they made up impossible requirements and hired their friend when noone else applied. Rumor only, but plausible.

I have come to believe that years of "workplace" experience is actually counterproductive. Old technical workers are usually burnouts and pension-track'ers. Even the ones that aren't have generally learned the wrong lessons. They've seen too many failures and have come to believe that success is impossible. They don't realize that the failures are demographic (too many incompetent people) and can be reduced by achieving a critical mass of competency.

A very talented senior engineer told me a couple days ago that our organization has a problem with "young guys who try to fix everything." He had worked programs where inadequate documentation, unit testing and regression testing meant that every change introduced bugs. He didn't recognize the root cause, so now he opposes important maintainability improvements. Never mind that they would reduce errors and improve efficiency in the long run. Changes = bugs in his mind and should only be allowed when the directly eliminate a known defect.

I have a quote memorized that I read somewhere: "Programming is a young man's job."

One of the senior architects here occasionally corners people in a room who have problems and attempts to assist with debug. It's like a pity debug session for individual contributors who don't do real work any more.

It's like my boss trying to contribute to stuff :-\ He's been the roadblock for getting stuff done!