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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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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.)
Sure, they can probably crank out good code, but they will lack the experience to make good decisions about the program design and logic. School can teach you a lot, but it can't teach you what years of experience will teach you.
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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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
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.
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
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.
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-
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
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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