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Is Experience in Programming Worth Anything?
damphlett asks: "My boss is a person of considerable hiring power within the Software Development area of a major global Investment Bank. I've just had a conversation with him that scared the hell out of me. He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience. As someone with 12 years C++ the difference is so self evident I barely knew where to begin explaining his error, but he won't be convinced otherwise. Can Slashdot offer up some tangible benefits that can result from 10+ years experience in programming that I can share with him?"
The person with 10 years experience has had more failures to learn from. Life experience applies in the programming field as much as any other.
more experience can (sometimes) be bad. because you are set in your ways. sometimes a newbie brings fresh ideas and new ways to do something
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Fresh college graduates can often code with the best of them. It's about skill, not experience.
Repeal the DMCA!
C++ is being phased out by Java, C# and various scripting languages anyway, because they're safe and speed usually doesn't matter if you're just trying to get some non-time-critical work done. If I had a penny everytime C++ was used for string manipulation which could have been done in perl 100 times faster and more secure, I'd be a rich man right now. I guess that's the schools fault though, not teaching kids to use the right tool for the job. Of course, C++ is here to stay, but eventually the only place where it'll be used is going to be games, system programming and embedded applications (but even here, Java is starting to turn up, which imo is a mistake.)
I have slaved away for years to become a programmer who knows the tools of my trade inside out, reading books on this and that, and trying everything within my power to write great code.
Many many programmers aren't like that. They may not be CS trained, not hardcore geeks, or what have you...
Wait till your boss asks you to "dumb it down" and not to use Generics/Templates/Inner Classes/Overloading/whatever, because others are having trouble understanding/maintaining your code.
Wait till they ask you to write it in VB, because Java/C++ programmers are too hard to find.
What scares me the most is... given some of the sad skill sets I have seen in people calling themselves programmers, is that the boss might be right.
In most areas, 2 years is enough time to get someone fairly experienced (they know what to do), but more time is required to have enough experience to become polished and an "expert." For example, after 2 years or practice, you might be an experienced archer, horseman, or cook, but, more likely than not, it takes more time before the knowledge becomes instinctual, you have enough experience to know the various things that can go wrong (how to figure that something has gone wrong based on small clues and how compensate for them), and you can even begin compete with the best.
An analogy. Your boss's son is accused of a crime that he didn't commit. Would he rather have someone who is 2 years out of law school to defend him or someone who has 10+ years of standing in front of juries? Both, in theory, know the law equally well and the general theory of how to defend a client. The 10+ year person who has more experience is more likely to know what will work with juries, how to read them, how to work with judges, how to work with forensic experts, and how to make the best presentation.
Most programmers take three years to really 'get' C++ and once they do, any additional experience is of value if it broadens out to particular API. So for example, if I'm looking for a PS2 developer with vector unit experience, an applicant with 1 year of C++ on a PS2 that includes some low level experience will be preferred to an applicant with 10 years MFC C++ experience.
Essentially, its the application environment that is the valued experience after 3 years of C++. Less than 3 years, I need to see if they actually know C++. So your boss is only a little wrong.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Because technology is changing so quickly, having a lot of experience with a particular technology (in this case C++) can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
Good things: Lots of inherent tip & tricks about software design, what works in certain situations and generally a better understanding of what the clients/managers want.
Bad things: Natural inclination to stick to the technology they know best rather than whats the best in that particular situation.
I tend to think people with a lot of development experience should move into becoming technology managers. This is where their experience is most valuable and they will tend to be better at relating to and understanding programmers and the software development lifecycle.
Funtage Factor: Purple
Would your boss want a green mechanic working on his car, or one who's been around the block a few times?
If experience isn't the key issue, maybe you can convince him that you can do his job just as well as he can.
If all else fails, get a baseball bat and club his freakishly stupid brains in, then go get a recently graduated surgeon to put humpty dumpty's pieces back together again.
Your boss does have a somewhat valid idea though, there is a point at which most students of the C/C++ language (or any language) will settle into regurgitation of idiomatic expressions. These people are more technicians than programming artists. The true artists of programming are those people who know languages, operating systems and computer science in general to a depth that they will have jobs regardless of what the economy is doing. The problem is that artists are hard to find. If you consider yourself to be one, I would point this out to your boss and discuss this with him at length. Perhaps you could somehow become involved with the hiring process, or in a sort of continuing education process for programmers at your job.
Good luck with the debate. :)
PS - For anyone who noticed the reference, I did steal the artist/technician concept from a Robert Browning poem. :D
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Face it: most business problems have a striking similarity, especially when opposed to handling binary data types such as in image processing. Error handling for basic text and numeric data constructs is something that should be mastered within a few years. The difference between someone ten years into IT and someone just two years in is that they know the whole stack better: from operating system to database setups to application layer design. Odds are that they'll be more adept at building more secure systems if they've been around longer too, meaning systems that are more robust/reliable, better prepared to handle growth (scaling up AND scaling out), more highly available, etc.
Structuring data and networked systems for the long haul is and will remain a valuable skill. Particular languages, while important skillsets, are just one piece of that puzzle. Have your boss investigate the candidates' proficiency with the security professional's Common Body of Knowledge (www.isc2.org) and I'll doubt the 10 year coder and 2 year coder will rate the same on it.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
In game development somebody with 2 years of full-time experience has most likely only completed one major 18-month project. From personal experience, it took me three projects (and about five years) before I really figured out how little I knew and I started to become comfortable with diving into unknown code to fix it.
The quality, consistency and performance of the code I write now (after 7 years of C++) blows away anything I wrote as recently as two years ago. And I'm sure I'll continue to improve. Every day I still learn something new. If not a new problem, a new approach to a problem - or a more elegant and efficient solution.
A programmer with 2 years experience and a somewhat grizzled 10-year industry veteran are wildly different beasts. One thinks they know everything, the other knows how little they really know - their problem-solving and abstraction skills are much more concrete.
I'm not in a position to comment on the exact nature of the C++ programmer positions that the article submitter was talking about. But it almost sounds as though they were focusing on a single aspect of development - expecting a programmer to specialize in one thing and never do anything different. If you spend two years doing nothing but, say, building linked lists - your approach is not likely to be very different after 10 years of doing the same.
But not only does this level of overspecialization sound horribly, horribly wrong - it builds unversatile programmers.. but it also sounds like such a position would be mind-numbingly boring. However - I'm sure some people could do it, if they wanted to work without learning anything different. Perhaps your recruiter has only encountered such programmers before.
If he thinks someone with fewer years experience is just as capable of doing his job. (He'll probably say no.) Ask him why.
...if he was, he'd be looking for people with 10 years experience in C#. That'd be so typical of recruiters.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience.
Sticking to the exact wording, he's exactly correct. It doesn't really take more than two years for a professional to get familiar with all the nuances and nuisances of any programming language, including C++. Technical expertise really doesn't progress transitively beyond those years.
What you should be trying to convince your boss is of everything else around this experience. Mention the depth of your acquisitions -- your understanding of the field, your knowledge of the development process, your success in leading projects, your ability to control (or rather, hide) your ego -- all to whatever extent.
Every skill has its threshold, beyond which advancement is stagnant. Your boss figures he's discovered that point. He might not be in the same ballpark but he's definitely playing the right game.
People like your boss think they know C++. People who have a deep understanding of C++ realize that the pool that they're wading in is much deeper than they can see.
Here's my last rant on the subject.
Ask your boss if he's read anything by Alexandrescu. I'll bet he doesn't even recognize the name. Ask him if he subscribes to C/C++ Users Journal. Ask him what he thinks of Boost or Loki. He probably hasn't even heard of them either.
I think people who have 12 years of experience and are still "programmers" are wasting their experience, and I may be agreeing with your boss here.. but probably from a different point of view.
If you have 12 years of experience, by now you should have collected enough experience to have moved beyond "programming." Your skills are better spent in architecture and software design, and not coding. After a while, the programming language becomes irrelevant, and yes, you can trust the 2+ years programmers to implement what you design. You may be a hot shot programmer, but you can't match the speed with which a proper design is implemented by 12 code monkeys working in parallel.
Yes, I do know that are people who like programming. However most people are expected to grow and develop, and I think architecture/design is on the logical path away from programming.
Just my $0.03.
People with 10+ years experience tend too overvalue their skills and experience ;)
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Open Source Sysadmin
Your boss is right, and it sucks, and I wish it could be otherwise. Unfortunately, reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
I'm a graduate student. As such, I see a lot of code both from students and from professors. The students have an excuse for lousy code. The professors don't.
In one of the undergraduate CompSci courses, a professor asked on an exam a Java question which could not be answered correctly. If you didn't know Java very well, you'd give an answer which, at first blush, you'd think would work fine, but would have all manner of subtle problems later on down the road. If you knew Java well enough to use a different technique and avoid these subtle problems, you got zero credit for it because you didn't demonstrate any knowledge of how to use the techniques which were being tested on the exam.
I'm not making this stuff up. This stuff is far from unusual; in any reasonably large department there's going to be someone who's too incompetent to ever get anywhere in the research side of things, so where do they wind up? Teaching undergraduate courses instead. The best minds cloister themselves in research and graduate classes; the worst minds get to teach the next generation.
So what happens when these undergrads leave school and go into the real world? Well, if they're talented, smart and willing to work like hell, they'll spend the next five or six years mastering languages and techniques and getting painful lessons from bitter experience. On the other hand, 90% of them say <Keanu> "I know Java-Fu." </Keanu> And they don't, and they can't be persuaded that they don't. Because after all, they have a Bachelor's degree, right? That means they know this stuff, right?
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years actively engaged in learning, in developing new skills, in finding interesting corners and how-to-do-weird-things, is a gift from the Almighty. Treasure these people. They are rare.
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years doing the same sorts of problems the same way over and over and over again is eleven years past their sell-by date.
There are a lot more of the latter than the former.
Pre-Y2K I was hired by a major telecommunications company. I soon found myself an unofficial liaison to the UNIX development group, because being a recent college grad I understood modern C++. The UNIX development group had a lot of programmers, some who'd started using C++ in 1983... and none of them had kept abreast of the ever-evolving C++ spec past '93. That meant that when we got an updated C++ compiler that was stricter and more standards-conformant, half their code immediately crapped out all over the place, and I got dragged over to the UNIX dev group to walk them through modernizing their code.
So imagine that you're the manager of the UNIX dev group. What you see are a bunch of old graybeards with 20+ years of software experience (and salaries to match!), who are relying on a twentysomething not six months out of college to tell them how to make their code compile.
What would you as the manager think? Would you think "damn, that kid must be really hot!", or would you think "damn, experience in programming is really overrated!"?
Now, these guys who didn't know beans about modern C++ knew every single bug, quirk and weirdness in the phone system. They were walking Bugzillas for phreaking, fraud and mayhem. They knew every RS-6000, they knew every weirdness of our systems. But once outside the very narrow domain of our systems, they were completely out of their depth. They were essentially unemployable as programmers given how dated their programming knowledge was.
There are a lot of guys like that out there. They far outnumber the hardcore geeks who never stop learning and who pride themselves on always staying current.
Ask him if his years of experience matter, or if a manager with 2 years experience can do as well as one with 10 years of experience.
He'll probably say it is different, since his skills involve people. You can point out (if you want to piss him off) that his people skills can't be that great, or he wouldn't be degrading you the way he is. In 12 years someone in ANY field has time to watch the changes, learn the trends, figure out which way things tend to move, and see many, many things that don't work and learn to avoid them for things that do work.
I have been programming seriously for a few years, but will be moving on beyond any programming soon for my passion: writing. (I write poetry and screenplays and came close to writing for Trek:TNG at one point.) I have no problem saying programming is as intuitive as writing poetry and requires the same experience and practice to improve one's art and skill. It seems that your manager doesn't understand this and thinks computers, being made up of bits, can only be but so complex.
Or, there's the other side of the situation: you can't enlighten someone who thinks they know everything. Obviously your boss, who has likely been his job for a while, has NOT learned much about people, but thinks he has. You can't teach people like that. In his case, there is probably no difference in the skills he knew in his job after 2 years and those he learned in the next 10 -- he's too busy saying he knows everything to learn anything.
You said "He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience."
Everyone comment I've read treats this as a question of fact. I'm guessing it isn't. It's a sociological phenomenon. There are several possible theories. More than one of them could be true simultaneously. Not all of them are mentioned below.
1) He doesn't believe that and is only saying it to you because he wants to act out anger.
2) He believes that. Intimidation is important to him, and he would rather hire someone he is likely to be able to intimidate rather than someone he would be required to respect somewhat.
3) He doesn't believe it, but is saying it because he is trying to hide his jealousy about not knowing very much about technical things. This is common. The logical people, as programmers are required to be, don't get respect from the people who are not able to be logical. To give the logical people respect would mean that he should study how to be logical, and he is trying to hide that from himself, since he has three kids, a wife, a house, a mortgage, other debts, and doesn't have the freedom to improve himself.
4) It doesn't matter what he thinks. He is really, really ignorant. He knows nothing about code quality. In actuality, it is common during programming to discover some serious flaw in the original specifcation for the project. It may take someone with even more experience than 10 years to recognize this and know what to do.
5) His mind is so disorganized that it is impossible to determine what he really thinks, even for him.
6) It doesn't matter what he thinks because you have made a mistake, and it appears to you that he has "considerable hiring power", but that is not true.
7) He realizes that he will be forced to outsource your job soon, and his statement is only symbolic of the true disrespect coming from the company.
Here's but a tiny fraction: Bitwise arithmetic, polymorphism, virtual functions, template templates, operator-overloading, cast-overloading, low-level memory pointer casting tricks, optimizations, prime fields, and of course the STL ... these things alone take quite a bit of time to learn. If your boss believes that even this chunk of concepts can be digested into a form in such a way that could possibly give equal footing to people with experience levels differing by as much as 1/6th, then he's got some explaining to do.
... then we must focus on style and habit:
... you're doing what works. You're not still practicing "binge" programming where you work 11 hours at a time or more (20+ at a time for those in late teens/early twenties who want to destroy themselves) -- instead, you work smartly, with breaks, and in a more reasonable fashion. You have a planned structure even before you start to code. You're so familiar with the language enough that if there is something new, you assimilate it quite easily into your own ADT<tools> of tricks.
... all in good, respected time.
:-)
Still, maybe a person with a background in C with C# and/or Java could theoretically master C++ in a short period of time.
But, let's just ignore the semantics and tricks, for a second, and simply assume it IS easy to pick up in two years, since not all people learn at the same speed, so there should be at least a small-medium-sized amount of 2year-experienced brilliance
Nutshell: The differences are familiarity, code modularity, and time/energy efficiency.
Verbose: By 12 years, it's like reading and writing. You debug your code before you write it. You know every possible mistake your code could come up with, across various compilers, and how to deal with one when it arises -- since you know that no matter how good you are, errors will crop up. On the other hand, two years of experience can still have you wracking your brain for a hideously irritating and trite error that you've somehow overlooked.
Your ever-growing library of re-useable code snippets can, by now, create at least a working framework for anything under the sun within any requested period of time.
Speaking of time, you can save lots, since you're not trying out ideas which are new to you (and old to everyone else)
That is what experience means, and it is attainable by anyone
PS - C++ ain't goin' nowhere. And if you java/C++ programmers want somethin' really interesting to chew on, go to s-mail.org and look at this guy's minimalAPI src2src conversion code.
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
Years of experience count for something, but someone with decades of experience of building houses and shoplots won't necessarily be good at building highways, bridges and towers.
;). Better than _just_ watching MTV/Nickelodeon/Disney all day.
It's more using the right tool for the job thing. If he only needs "cheap VB/Java" programmers then 12 years in C++ doesn't count for much.
"Can Slashdot offer up some tangible benefits that can result from 10+ years experience in programming that I can share with him?"
You say you have 12 years of C++ and you have to resort to Slashdot to show why it counts for something?
I'd say it's better to keep your mouth shut till you figure out a few really convincing things. If your boss can't tell the difference between you and a C++ programmer with 2 years experience, it's time for you to get a new boss or prepare for an income impacting incident...
The world has tons of C++ programmers with years of experience, and yet we keep having "attacker can run arbitrary code of his/her choice" problems.
If you ask me, years of experience don't count. Track record counts. Years of "evidence" if you wish.
A programmer who's been churning out crap code for 10 years, is likely to keep doing that.
Lots of geniuses do their best work before they hit their mid/late 20s (I should be sent to the glue factory by now - I suppose that's why I'm using Perl ).
Get some smart 9 year old kids to learn programming in a suitable environment[1] and by the time they're legally hireable they'll be damn good. Once they're past their best they'd probably be married or something then you can "promote" them to Project Manager or something.
[1] They say the best time for people to learn languages is before their teens. Instead of just French/German/Japanese etc, why not C++, Java and LISP as well
Maybe he needs to borrow an idea from artists, and have a porfolio? The more variety the better.
You're boss's headcount is the only thing that matters.
So does the mythical man month. I find it funny how people are quite willing to quote other parts of that book like it's the bible of software development, but conveniently neglect the fact that it also contends that productivity doesn't have much correlation with experience. Perhaps that makes people feel uncomfortable (or at least makes their billing rate uncomfortable)?
... I feel software development is more about intuition and instinct than experience and learning. Good software developers have a gut feel for what is the right path to take - bad ones tend to rely on "I read we should do this" or "we did it this way on the last project, so we should do it that way on this one".
i ence-a-valueless-commodity/
It makes perfect sense to me
Anyway, I recently wrote more about this (shameless plug): http://dontletsstart.com/entries/2004/04/15/exper
He should have grow and developped.
Just to be a pesky composer, my goodness.
He could have been a respected conductor.
A librettist.
Or even better, an opera empresario.
Most people are expected to grow and develop....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Since most /.ers are late teens or early 20s the answer was obviously predictable.
So far most comments pat the ignorant boss in the back for being so insightful, well, the pat comming mostly from people with hardly any experience in the working place has very little value.
Now, from old fart to whinney youngs, let me tell you this, prgraomming mad skillz can be put to better use if you have lived a bit more.
Young programmers have a tendency to reinvent the wheel because simply they have not seen other wheels before. For a company that is an absolute tragedy. Older, more experienced prgrammers bring with them something called perspective and corporate awarness.
Thye are the people that will tell you if something has done before, it perhaps ther is a piece of code, an script, an algorith, that solves a given problem.
The best programmer is not the one that programs 1000 lines of code to solve one problem, but the one that remembers sombedy else wrote a similar program that can be modified with little effort.
That is why experience is important.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience.
In almost any field of skill, you get some people who eventually push out the limits -- they almost never stop learning and advancing -- and there are others who hardly advance beyond the basic skill level, if they achieve that.
Your boss may be jaded by the experience of hiring people from the second group, but you might need to remind him that the first group exists too.
It's the difference between people who really have 12 years of experience, and those who have had practically the same initial two years, but six times over.
Your boss may challenge you to show indicators of continuing development and acquisition of mature skill, but that would be a different question.
-wb-
To be honest I think that any team composed entirely of (older|younger) programmers wouldn't be the best to have particularly from a company/business perspective. Consider a group of old programmers working their craft. Firstly they cost more.. this is probably what your boss is talking about. Also what happens when they all retire/move on, what happens to the system that particular group was maintaining? It will either fall over and die, or someone will have to be hired to wade through all the legacy code with the mountain of patches ect ect. Now consider a group of young programmers. They think they know everything but really there are several traps awaiting them in the real world and they will probably fall into every single one without fail. Now consider a group comprised of experienced and inexperienced programmers. The inexperienced can learn quickly from their mistakes and not spend much time on fixing them because the experienced programmers already know how. And when the experienced programmers leave we have trained replacements already there, who know the system, know the company and are able to adequetly fill the shoes of the person who just left. --------- Then along comes the boss, sees all these young programmers getting along great.. and hires too many of them because they are cheaper...
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
I am a coder. And a sysadmin. Been up in the ladder, was a PHB and a big-shot (CIO) for three and two years, respectively. It sucks. I love to code and hack. I code and hack the things I like to code and hack 10x better, faster, well-tought, and maintainable than when I got out of university 13 years ago.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
In a sense, you boss might be right. I have almost 8 years of professional programming experience though I'm doing something else(selling women's clothes, ;-). but I'm still doing programming as my hobby) in S.Korea after dot.com collapse.
Anyway, what I've found out is proper balance between theory and experience.
If you have lots of experience without proper theory, you reaily get stereotyped and you don't find anything creative.
But if you know lots of theory without experience, 9 cases out of 10, you'll make a huge and dangerous mistake since the world( or even computer programs) doesn't work as you perceive with your brain.
There is a huge gap between theory and reality and I think EXPERIENCE is a method of filling the gap.
Probably, you boss saw too many experienced programmers without proper theoretical background.
With proper & fresh theory, you'll get more creative in inventing solutions.
Also with you experience, you'll get far more efficient and less dangerous in implenenting your idea.
That's what I've found after those hellish 8 years of programming.
Take care~
Your ego is Matrix!
Experience is everything in programming. So many of the concepts and mental tools a programmer uses are only developed by reading and writing lots of good code.
Now, you should be careful that the experience is valuable; two years of experience developing quality code is obviously better than ten years of junk.
What your boss might be trying to say is that the skills that a senior developer has over a junior one doesn't provide a benefit to the company, or doesn't justify the extra pay he'll demand. Sometimes you will only need a junior developer.
For your boss, it's only a matter of being able to make it or not. He doesn't want employees to come in his office and cry because their task is too hard. The idea with 2 and 10 years being the same is that this is sufficient to eliminate those dumb workers.
recognises that it's a job, and you don't do what you don't get paid for. That there is no excuse for any project to demand your unpaid overtime, and furthermore, that no project if it was managed properly whould ever need such contributions.
:-)
That's probably why they prefer ppl with 2 years experience
You can do 10 years of C++ programming and learn very little. And someone else can do 2 years of C++ programming and be a much better programmer than you (and still "know less" C++ than you).
Some environments also tend to equalize skills. For applications programming in Visual C++, it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you have 2 years or 10 years of experience: the environment ensures a certain degree of uniformity of product. Java and C#, in fact, further equalize the playing field by removing most of the tricky stuff (memory management, error checking, etc.) from day-to-day programming, the stuff that traditionally required skill and expertise to deal with correctly.
By analogy, it probably doesn't make much of a difference to his product whether a MacDonald's short order cook has 2 years or 10 years experience: you get the same predictable mass-market stuff out of him. Yet, there are many restaurants where the difference between 2 years and 10 years experience for a cook are huge.
So, in short, your boss isn't obviously wrong or obviously right--it depends on the kind of work you are doing. If you are doing mainstream application development, I suspect your boss is largely right. (Keep in mind that unlike the MacDonald's short order cook, your standardized mass-market job can be outsourced to India, so maybe it's time to move into something more challenging.)
So make sure you are using your role as a mentor correctly
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Sheesh. Let's see, what sorts of things will you know with 10 years experience that you wouldn't with 2:
www.eFax.com are spammers
As someone learning to program now, and as someone who is learning to really ENJOY creating clean code, this article is somewhat disturbing. If hiring managers and HR do not recognize the value of an experienced C++ (or any) kind of programmer, then what is my incentive to learn to become so, other than as a hobby?
I know the answer for me: I will continue down the path of the coding Pai Mei (kill bill 2!) - I do what I do for honor, and because it is right, and no other reason.
But...damn that sucks they arent going value me any more for it!
The answer also depends on the work and workplace. If it is a large IT organization that needs another warm body to crank out code designed by the company's gurus, then the less experienced (less expensive) programmer is fine.
If it's a smaller company and the "programmer" will also be responsible for software architecture, high-level design, purchasing tools, and unsupervised coding, then you want the most experienced person possible. For higher-level software engineering, you want someone with a diversified mental library of patterns, designs, and experiences.
It also depends on the code. If its for small little utilties with a short lifespan, limited userbase, and simple control flow logic, then a less experienced programmer is OK. If the code is mission-critical, high-performance, inner-loop code, then you will want the more experienced person.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Your boss is right, in the context of hiring a new programmer into a mature programming team. Because this is probably his most common situation, his generalization is correct for him, in his current position.
The point of diminishing returns on a chart of experience vs. time is definitely around 2 years. The extreme problems that can arise from the mistakes a younger (2 years experience) programmer will make can be catastrophic. Likewise, hiring an entire department of younger programmers would likely loose you your job as a hiring manager.
If you hire a younger programmer into a department with an average experience of ~5 years, the mistakes that younger programmers make can be mitigated far earlier, preventing them from causing catastrophic problems. This same situation allows you to harness the knowledge of a wide array of experience levels. It also usually helps you hire programmers before another company over-pays them, causing them to ask you for more money than they are worth.
If you try to explain this in technical terms, you've already lost the argument. You're up against the classic case of the engineer against the business person. Although you are both speaking English, neither of you has the faintest understanding of what the other is talking about. You need to discuss this in language your boss understands.
Start by asking your boss how a manager with 10 years experience is different from a manager with 2 years experience. You'll probably get answers about more successful projects, different environments, larger budgetary authority, better political skills, maybe better "instincts", etc. Look for analogies in how those answers apply to developers. I have yet to meet a developer with 2 years experience who has the skills to handle a meeting with marketing, manage a bug review session, negotiate features with clients, or any number of other "soft skills." These are skills your boss will understand.
Also, don't lump programmers in the same bin with architects. I've never met an architect with less than ten years experience who was worth diddily. Programming skills may be there, but people skills, technical writing skills, quality assurance methodology, security concerns, cost vs. feature tradeoffs - all of the skills necessary to be an architect take a *long* time to develop, and many of these skills are similar to what your boss's peers develop between years 2 and 10.
Finally, what the "run of the mill" developer learns between years 2 and 10 depends heavily on training by their employer. If the employer doesn't require them to read books, read magazines, improve code quality and grow beyong the "Year 2" knowledge, than most of them never will.
For a long, long time there has been a tension between bosses who know that they might be able to hire 2 or 3 of me in the lite version (VB or Java). But the problem is that these guys can't work the API's necessary to make the hardware run. Sure we can both write a business app that looks and (post .NET CLR) works about the same. But try to get the VB or .NET to drive the HW.
.NET, WDM, WAPI, TAPI, & on & on. You sure don't get into the deep end of the pool from zero C++ to implementing those & the many other M$ & non M$ APIs inside of two years.
So they have to pay us more. Here's what he has over you: the ability to put you in the buh, buh, buh mode before you can get the seventy zillion arguments posters like wowbagger & others have put here. And there the conversation ends.
Mastering C++ is a beginning, not an end. Yes, it took me that long to know C++ well, and STL pretty well. But then there was MFC,
Chances are the boss who told you this knows these things full well. But he wanted to send you into that kind of "buh...buh....buh" boardroom tailspin where he feels as though he's got a petty victory and can provoke you into showing your cards: you have another offer now or you don't, or you're ready to jump without one. Or maybe you care to argue back. Go ahead. You're argument & ten pennies might get you a dime.
As C++ veteran, for the last decade or so, I know how to do many things. But this isn't the same as always knowing what to do. You and I are working for other people because we don't have financing for our own killer app idea through or bringing in cash.
Boss to peon: life is a shit sandwich. Like it? Yum.
I would take a completely different tack. Instead of trying to blindly convince your boss that experience counts, try asking him how he arrived at his conclusion. The answer might surprise you. At the very least, you better understand how he arrived at his conclusions and are better able to counter them.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Having a wife who is in academia and myself working for the last 17 years running a computer consultantry, I'm calling your bluff.
Yes, most professors code sucks. I know, because I have been called it to help repair it. Academia *don't* make a living architecting, designing and coding. They making a living thinking about such things (and then having graduate students code it). Now, I will admit that I have interviewed a lot of "grizzled veteran's" who are very narrow in focus. Programming COBOL and Fortran and old school C. If my project is in that area, I would hire them in a heartbeat. I have also interviewed a lot of 12+ year veteran's who know a broad range of tools, learn quickly and (not coincidently) are valueable members of my team today. Having spent a lot of time on the interview side, I will say point blank that your "there are a lot of guys out there" statement doesn't wash with my interviews. The split is roughly 50/50: focused vs jack of all trades. Additionally, you dismiss those focused programmers far to easily: I have found that with a few weeks of training, those focused programmers can gain the same level of focus on *your* project, and achieve mighty things.
On the flip side, I have interviewed a lot of graduate student with your world view: everyone older than me is washed out, I am gods gift to the world, and those poor BS students are sad sad programmers without the credentials I have. May I suggest, from my "grizzled, out of date perspective" that you grow up that last little bit? You wouldn't pass the personality part of my interview: while I believe technical knowledge can be learned, arrogance takes far too long to beat out of someone.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Conductors and orchestra members are the programmers, adjusting the notes and delivering the music in their intepretation of what they read. How many orchestras compose sheet music as their primary act/art? How many of those with experience in an orchestra might go on to compose?
Being a programmer and a piano player, I see many similarities between music and programming, in both the art and the "artists". Someone who has played an instrument for 12 years may not have progressed past the stage of memorizing sequences of notes, yet another who's studied for only 2 or 5, might be able to play anything heard but once, or create something that noone has heard before.
You can distinguish an amateur from a professional in the way they play and they way they code. But you might not be able to pick out the gifted composer or architect so easily. Code monkeys might work best in an 'orchestrated' environment (if you'll excuse the pun). But only the best can be successful conductors. Not everyone wants to take on the responsibility that accompanies the job, though.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
I've been in IT for just over ten years now. I'm just as worried as any other; however, I do see a diminishing rate of return from people with simply more "programming" experience.
How much a premium do you pay for someone with 10+ years of C++ experience? If you have budget for five senior development staff, would you get the same value by hiring two 10+ year experience individuals to supervise and mentor six with only 2 years experience?
I guess this all has to be taken in context though. For just a code monkey position, really do you need someone with that much experience? Just having someone churn out code?
But let's say you code specialized derivatives trading algorithms or something that is deemed a major revenue producer product, where 10+ years of C++ plus 10+ years of business logic understanding...that's where you pay top dollar.
This is also the basis of a lot of "outsourcing" arguments. Code monkeys are the next McD's workers unless you have an intimate understanding of the business or have other non-IT skills that make you sell yourself better than the next guy.
It's not the language that counts, it is experience in the wierd and wonderful ways that computers can misunderstand you that matters. I've been at this lark thiry years now - Fortran, Algol, Pascal, C, C++ and nowadays Java. You can learn a new language in days and become fluent in months. But until you have been scarred by the many and varied ways in which computer systems bite back at anybody who takes anything for granted, I don't want you on my project. Someone with 10 years Cobol and 2 years C++: looks good. Someone straight out of college who started learning C++ two years ago: very dubious.
Latin: Experior I try. Expertus sum I have tried - or, I am an expert. If you've been there, done that, and got the crash dumps, then languages are irrelevant.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
You are asking about one of the fundamental flaws in your chosen profession, and one of the key reasons I stopped trying to work as a programmer years ago. Fact of life: Managers don't look at what you can do, they look at what you have done.
.
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The same technician-manager conflict arises in virtually every technical profession; ask any experienced engineer, or even a good welder. Management and HR can't judge ability from your resume; they can only judge success. But I've said for years there's no technical job in which sheer incompetence can be so easily disguised as in programming. The imbalance is more severe, because the true incompetents are so much more dense (in more than one sense).
And management knows it. Hiring a programming team is a crapshoot, because you may not find out for years which of them is worth the money. Experience is superior to education, but it's far easier to see if a welder can lay a bead cleanly than if a programmer can write 10K lines of clean code.
In my day I wrote payroll software in Fortran, library routines and system utilities in assembler or PL-6, and database applications in (gack!) COBOL. Fortran was clean, assembler and PL-6 had system-level access, and HAIRBOL had database functions built in. I used what I had to, however it worked. I didn't think of myself as a Fortran or COBOL programmer; I thought of myself as a system programmer and (in occasional moments of overconfidence) a system designer.
But to prospective employers, I learned, I was not a system designer or a system programmer; I wasn't even particularly a Fortran or COBOL programmer. I was a Honeywell programmer because that's the hardware my company had. I was a accounting programmer because I'd written accounting software.
So the way you phrased your question catches my ear. First:
As someone with 12 years C++ . .
but then:
. . . from 10+ years experience in programming . .
Which is it? Is your boss looking at the amount of time you've spent in C++ (and you should learn even a complex language thoroughly in 2 years) or at your body of work as a programmer?
The manager who needs a search engine would rather hire a kid who spent 2 years coding someone else's engine than someone with decades of design experience from accounting to gene sequencing who has never done a search engine. But the manager who needs a design team leader will look for someone who hasn't turned all his projects into lumber because the only tool he knew was a handsaw.
In conclusion (I ramble too much to say in summary), I believe this is an argument you can't win--you can only outlive it. Tangible benefits from years of programming experience take years to reveal.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
>> Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
;-)
And of course, two Wright's make an airplane
Every time you make a mistake that takes you 3 days to find and fix, you learn not to do that again.
That said, don't discriminate against people because of the numbers they write on their résúmé, but definitely in the interview ask the hard questions and don't settle for the guys who only kind of know what they're talking about. People who want to improve can get better in 3 years than someone who doesn't care will in 15.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Your 12+ years of experience should have prepared you to deal with short sighted/manipulative/ladder-climbing/egotistical managers a little bit better. You took it personally as an insult to your experiences and professionalism, but he's just playing with you because you're just a chess piece to him and he wants to put you in a square, not listen to what you have to say.
If you want to move to management, which is an obvious place for a 12 year programmer to go, especially in a company that values them the same as 2 year programmers, then he would probably be delighted to mentor you and get you started with a "team leader" position.
If you just want to get back at him, then you're playing his game and you're going to lose. Start looking for another job, but don't be surprised if you eventually have to deal with the same attitude from someone else at your new place.
12 years of C++ programming experience isn't worth anything more than 2 years of C++ programming experience. However, 12 years of software development experience IS worth a lot more than 2 years of software development experience (or 12 years of C++/any other language programming experience).
Lesseee...
That must follow your boss' experience. Perhaps he learned no more than his first two years of management taught him in the ten subsequent years.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's not a straightforward question/answer.
I agree that it only takes 2-3 years of solid C++ coding experience to reach very proficient level.
However, over a period of 10 years, your value as a designer increases if you've worked in multiple problem domains, multiple products, multiple environments, etc.
(Rant mode begin) ...
He's a f**king, stupid manager idiot, who's probably risen to the level he's at because he can talk the talk (but not walk the walk). Ever hear of the "Peter Principle"? This manager has risen to his level of incompetence. He's exactly like many of the tech managers at the huge financial company I work for. They have not a clue, about technology, about managing, about coding
(Rant mode end)
Sorry for the rant. This guy might be your friend, but don't ever work for him. Just reading UR posting set me off cause I have to deal with moronic tech managers who just don't have a clue about the project (or staff) they manage. It sounds like your friend may be the same.
Best O' Luck!
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
Veteran programmers tend to know all the common mistakes, the proven design strategies, and generally can code anything in a short amount of time and have it be efficient, reliable, scalable, maintainable, and extendable. A two year programmer might know the syntax, and the api's, but usually won't be able to produce good code. Generally, though not certainly, you often end up with something that seems to work, slowly, and fails under any sort of stress. They take 10 times as long to produce anything complex. They code themselves into corners. They can turn anything into spaghetti. They write more code to do less. They spend too much time on the little things. They fail to use all the tools available to them. They may lack business and communication skills. They reinvent the wheel. They're inconsistent. And anyone you bring in to clean up their mess will likely end up rewriting the whole thing anyway.
Not to say that they're useless for coding or that they're all that way, there are certainly a lot of trivial programming tasks out there, but you can't expect the same quality and value hiring underexperienced programmers as with veteran programmers.
"Can Slashdot offer up some benefits that can result from 10+ years experience?" In short, no. I'm sure you will find better answers on another website. Ask Dr Dobb's Journal maybe... Slashdot is for SCO rants or maybe to find out why N-Gage still sucks
Definitely another possibility. Should be, of course, "He doesn't believe the difference between 10 years and 2 years of experience is worth the difference in salary." And, if the 10 years is a serious extra 8 years of growthful experience, he is wrong. The moral of the story is, Don't believe what people in authority say without independent justification. Sometimes what they say is random nonsense.
The question is whether the person with 10 years had 10 years of experience, or 1 year repeated ten times.
The latter programmer is common and not worth hiring.
You boss has probably run into something I've seen way too may times that I'll sum up with a quote:
"There is a huge difference between 10 years of experience, and 1 year of experience ten times"
Unfortunately, there are way way too may programmers out there who hit a certain level of experience (usually around their 2nd or 3rd year), who then never learn anything more - they just do the same thing over and over again
IF you can find a programmer who keeps learning/ improving, a 10 year guys knows a HECK of a lot more than a 2 year guy. I will say, however, that from experience, the curve seems to be asymptotic - there is no way near as much difference between a 5 year guy and a 10 year guy, as a 10 and a 15, or a 15 and a 20 - and yes, I've been doing this for 22 years now
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I actually ended up using DFWI-IM as a standard code documentation notifier for some of the more wicked stuff I did in whatever code I was doing. It stands for 'Don't fuck with it, it's magic' and I generally reserved it for some of the more evil things like recursive routines and self modifying code.
Word on the street is that my name still gets used in vain from time to time by the guys still maintaining that code.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Hmmm.
What I'm looking for when I'm looking at two year resumes versus ten year ones is bound to be different.
When I'm looking for with the two years is a utilty programmer. Somebody who can be given clear specifications and who can create acceptable code which meets those specifications.
What I'm looking for in somebody who has a decade experience is different. What I'm looking for poise, professional polish, well honed analytical skills, design judgement, maturity and leadership. I'm looking for the much greater problem solving capabilities that come with experience. I expect a more experienced professional to be able to work better with others, to be able to anticipate problems better, to interact with customers, to handle and research problems with inconsistent or incomplete requirements, to respond to situations where the project may be in jeopardy with assurance and sound judgement. To be able to look at an anticipate problems such as security or scalability issues in a design or implementation. I expect them to have the maturity to handle organizational problems, such as dealing with a person in another department or a person at the customer's site that is being difficult. The list goes on and on.
Not everyone who stays with it acheives this level of professionalism; but very few acheive it in two years.
Now, I don't want to disparage your boss. He may have simply been talking about coding simple objects that have alredy been designed and have clear and bounded responsiblities. In that case he's right you really don't get that much better at that sort of thing after a couple of years, although there's always room for improvement. On the other hand, some managers are so poor at using the latent talents of their team that there is no difference between what a two year veteran and a ten year veteran are allowed to accomplish. If he is one of those, you are probably underappreciated.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bugtracking is more than blame game, it is more than cover your ass, it is a challenge / response forum that is tried and true and the only way to keep sanity in a large project period; versioning is just a convenient backup and restore otherwise. Junior programmers just don't get the process for several years. The process is more important than the code.
They're probably coding COBOL-type apps in C++. That's a low-level job for low level people.
You need people with 10 years experience and you need people with 2 years experience. What seems to happen at the moment is that there are no new hires and the people at the bottom do not have promotion prospects because everyone is holding on to their job (or not ....), basically low moral all around.
:) ...
Software is a comunity thing, not an individual thing. Communism is not optional but required
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
I think he might mean that todays equipment allows people to learn quicker, and as a result, the value of your labor decreases.
Your knowledge may be great, but it can all be duplicated in a quarter of the time it took you to gain it in todays computer envrionment.
Just a fact of technology.
Plus... As we gain experience we become a threat to those who provide our employment.
Employees have a Shelf Life
Take your skills and put them to work where they can fully grow without fear of getting too good
Become Self Employed
On the other hand, ...
In research I've been involved with it is clear that the number of years of experience a person has has very little to do with whether or not they are an expert. So the manager may well be right that he can get what he wants from folks with 2 years of experience. Its how you think, not how long you've been thinking that's important. An other article that mentioned that there is a real difference between high and low productivity teams, but I suspect that the reserach was silent on the effect of years of experience.
-John Van Voorhis
I have seen people with ten years experience and I have seen people with one years experience ten times.
;)
I would take the person with two years experience over someone with one year 10X. On the other hand, someone with ten good years of experience can be awsome.
Programming is a profession where a gifted and experienced person can produce things the average slob cant understand.
Your boss is most likely only able to judge average slobs. And that means you will never convince him because you will be asking him to act beyond his abilities. And don't ever expect him to hire someone smarter than he is. (present company excepted, of course
Good luck looking for your next job.
...however...
In my own programming carrer I have found that each year, my library of quick code snippits grows. The first year or two is spend learning how to do things, the rest of the time programmers spend making those things easier for themselves. When ask to a particular task they can do it much more quickly and efficently because they have some code they have already written that does "That" or is sufficently similar to the point where it can be quickly turned into "That"...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Talented people don't need experience ...
You can try to compose music, but you will not become a Beethoven, even if you're writing music for 10+ years!
Reality hurts!
There is one key rule: one good or great programmer is worth 100 of the other kind. Length of experience is less key than ability, provided that ability is molded by working within a great programming environment with highly experienced people to mentor the less experienced.
Your boss is an idiot. Give him the sentence fragment:
"The little"
And then ask him what it means. Meanwhile, give someone else the sentence:
"The little bird flies overhead while the hawk watches ominously."
One has 2 words, the other has 10. When you have 2 words you have no idea what the sentence means. Compare this to 2 years experience and 10. Its like seeing the whole picture vs seeing the first 2 words. If he can't see that then he has no business with such responsibility and it sounds like he is just covering his own lack of experience.
I completely agree with your boss. Programming is one of these activities, along with research in mathematics or artistic creation, where experience is worthless.
If I were to hire programmers, I would test of thoroughly they know the standards, tools, patterns and algorithms. Past experience can only be a source of inflexibility due to adherence to alien practices. The only value of experience is to contribute to wire the details of standards, tools, etc better into the programmer's brains.
Your boss foolish and not worth the time or effort it would take to enlighten him. It's common sense that in any aspect of life, not just programming, that more experience makes a person more able.
Beware, though, that there are some people who somehow got the impression they could just learn what they needed to learn in college. They have no interest in, or enthusiasm for learning more. They just want to do what they learned in college for thirty years, then retire.
This is especially false in the IT field where the requirements and technologies are constantly changing. As a more extreme example, a C programmer who is not willing to learn anything about any object-oriented programming languages is probably less valuable than someone proficient in current technologies regardless of how many years of experience he has.
It is my impression that the most valuable people, especially in this field, are not the people who have the most experience, but the most genuine enthusiasm for their work.
This characteristic alone could actually make a person with two years of experience much more valuable than a person with twelve years of experience.
Someone with twelve years of experience and a great deal of enthusiasm and interest in learning new techniques and new ways of applying old techniques should just about blow anyone away.
---- GhodMode
P.S.: I'm a very enthusiastic programmer with just about two years of experience. :)
-- GM