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?"

Comments

Your boss is right.

[rjh]

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.

Uh do you really want to do this?

[TheLink]

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.

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 ;). Better than _just_ watching MTV/Nickelodeon/Disney all day.