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'Years of experience' is a garbage metric

Isaac Lyman on August 03, 2017

Most of the development job descriptions I've seen lately have had a "minimum years of experience" requirement--some of them even list the required...
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Mark Bussell Jr

Reminds me of a bit I use in some of our internal training - "I've known people with 15 years experience, and I've known people with one year experience repeated 15 years in a row... at the annual dinner they get the same pin."

Gets an interesting mix of thoughtful and confused looks.

I can't claim it as original, I've seen various variations on that theme over the years.

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Erebos Manannán

I don't really understand, you keep repeating "Where on your resume do the passion projects go?" etc., when the answer is "on your resume". There is no unwritten rule or law anywhere that says you can't list your personal projects, hobbies, or write a block of text describing your passion in your work in your CV. It's more like the exact opposite, everyone should do that.

As an employer I absolutely value passion and talent more than years of expertise etc., and I actually rarely read CVs as such. The CVs are full of years of expertise and other useless information, and for your skills I mostly care about

1) how good you really are
2) how passionate you are, if programming is "just a job" and you have little skill, don't waste my time
3) how good are you at learning new things and adapting to changing situations

I generally attempt to find these out by first giving a practical programming test, and then having a 1:1 chat with the person to talk through their solution, and potential issues with it. I will check your CV for how many programming languages you have experience with, and links to GitHub or similar, the rest I will pretty much find out in an interview.

The cover letter I would generally use for specifying why exactly that place you're applying to is interesting to you, and maybe some special qualifications you would have specifically to work there.

Your CV should overall glow in a way that tells you are passionate about your work, if that's what you are. That you can do by adding a brief description of yourself and how you got interested in programming and learned your craft. If that is by modding your favorite game, great! Write it there.

There are a lot of different kinds of companies out there, if they do not want to hire you for your passion you probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway, just keep looking.

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Chris Walker

If you see an experience requirement on a job posting that you want to apply for, don't walk away from it! Job postings are often written by committee, and different resume screeners will focus on different things. Apply anyway. A good employer will know how to see past their own "required" bullet points.

The advice in this article to include your Github link is absolute gold. And where do your passion projects go on a resume? They should be a first class citizen on your resume, right alongside job experience and education! I've been involved in developer hiring for nearly 15 years, and developers who demonstrate that code is more than just a job are by far the most exciting potential hires.

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Christian Vasquez

Your post are 🔥, Isaac. Keep it up!

I'm currently working as a QA Analyst and between work and college I try to dedicate some time to the few apps I have on GitHub so that I can show what I can do.

I try to read as much as I can about clean code, best practices, principles, and so on. Just so I can show my future interviewers that the only thing holding me back is time/experience.

It's really easy to get burnout, but I know it will pay off later on :)

My plan is to refactor my apps to a point where I'm comfortable (adding unit test, end-to-end tests, decent UI, etc) before I apply to any job 🤓

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Salli Figler

Add a section toward the end of your resume titled "Other Related Experience". Put a few interesting sounding bullets about these projects. This just may intrigue the H R person to ask questions and want to know more. Then you have a chance to talk about your hobby projects that really are experience.

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Wait, are people not listing their hobbies and side projects on their resumes? Just list everything you want highlight. You can even put a long-term side-project right in with your career experience (just stop calling it "job" experience).

If you've been programming for 5 years, then it's 5 years experience. I don't care whether that was paid or hobby work.

However, I do value experience. If you read my article I'm proud to be a programmer you'll see the extent of experience a good programmer needs. This isn't something you can just magically have -- you need to actively work on projects where you'll get it.

But you're absolutely correct that just accumulating "job" years indicates nothing. I consider the years a prerequisite, but not a satisfying condition. Actually, when I do interviews it's often easiest to discover bad programmers with lots of questionable "experience". They tend not to be able to answer difficult programming questions, which they should be able to with that level of experience.

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Alan

I partially agree on this, but this behaviour would lead to other issues: what about people coming from places where internet is really slow? And people with other hobbies other than coding?

The point is that there isn't a one-fits-all method for recruiting technical people.

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Ahmed Rebai

About "Mention your open-source and hobby project experience in your cover letters." it can be added even if are still small contributions not really hard coding and implemented with high technologies, i didn't' have for example pull requests in nodejs or deno , all my contributions are to improve some readme files or fix data or add other useful resources , should be added ?

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Isaac Lyman

Yes! Your contributions matter.

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Ryan E Woodard

Great insight, I am teaching myself to code but do plan to get a Master's in Computer Science. Ill browse job opportunities from time to time to see what skill sets are in demand but am finding a lot of desirable experience >= x many years :(

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AnitaMathew

Perfection!

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Abhinav Galodha

Interesting read at dev.to/corgibytes/on-getting-older... for a perspective on the other side of the tunnel.

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Yaphi Berhanu

Fantastic. This article is so true.