You don’t need 10 years of experience to be a great developer.

You don’t need 10 years of experience to be a great developer.
You need 2 years of the right experience.

We’ve all seen it on job listings:

“Senior Developer – 8+ years of experience required.”
But let’s be honest… it’s not the years that count, it’s what you did with them.

⚡️ One dev might spend 5 years copying code and avoiding complexity.
⚡️ Another might spend 2 years solving real problems, building systems end to end, learning from failures, and asking hard questions.

Experience is not just time, it’s intensity, ownership, and curiosity.

I’ve seen developers with “junior” titles outperform so-called seniors, simply because they’ve been in environments that challenged them, mentored them, and pushed them beyond comfort zones.

So maybe it’s time we stop using experience like a stopwatch…
…and start asking:
“What have you actually built?”
“What did you learn when things broke?”
“How did you grow when things got tough?”

What’s your take on this?
Does time still matter — or is trajectory the real measure of experience?

Comments

[Ravavyr]

Sure, plenty of 10+ year devs suck, because they didn't apply themselves, or just never had the opportunity to work in dynamic environments where they learned more than one platform or basic skill set. Maybe their job just didn't need it and they just didn't make themselves learn other tools, languages, platforms, frameworks, etc.

You can think you're a great dev... sure.
but you absolutely CANNOT BE a great dev without at least 5 years of experience... because the reality is you just don't know what you don't know.

And frankly, with the millions of devs around the world, i'm still pretty sure there's only like a dozen who are actually "great devs".
99.999% pretty much suck at this stuff and barely hang on to their jobs because most other people are not tech savvy enough to tell.
And then there's that tiny percentage of us with experience and who have put in the effort to build a whole buncha things that most people will never see, and a handful of things that run a lot of the world and are one tiny mistake away from blowing up.

Something like that anyway...