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Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience.

A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you can lead a team of surgeons.

In IT we have some strange cult of inexperience. And this makes me sad.

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Because you might not fit in "culturally". Which is BS. I've noticed that going to work for many, primarily younger, people is more a social thing than a professional one. I see lots of time spent talking about and focusing on what people did in the 16 or so hours since they last saw each other at work. Mondays are the worst as sometimes an hour or more is blown catching up on what everyone did over the weekend. People and teams are lacking direction and focus. These younger teams need stronger leaders able to focus and re focus the culture and discussions on achieving organizational goals. These "work is social" folks fear those who might make them look bad by focusing on Getting Shit Done rather than focusing on people's personal lives. This isn't to say we shouldn't care about people and their lives outside of work, we should be empathetic, but it shouldn't be what the team gels around.

"This should always be a normal Monday" or "This should never be a normal Monday" are both wrong. What matters is that the team is productive.

There's always a give and take, especially with the labor market being tight. All a balance between value_of_happy_employees : value_of_more_work. Because the only thing worse than the current team pissing away time is having to hire a new team...

So I assume that in 10 years those valuable employees will be fired, as they won't fit culturally, regardless spending the last 10 years in that company :)

20 year programmers fairly often get to "lead teams of programmers".

In some ways, it's staying hands-on that can be difficult. At least if you want to be recognised and valued as someone who's experienced and can take on challenging problems without a lot of support.

The surgeon only did his first operation 3 years ago and started studying medicine a few years earlier.

The developer did his first program a decade ago when he was around 12 and he's been studying and practicing ever since.

“A decade ago” is more than “3-6 years” of experience - is that your argument? Because he doesn’t have 3-6 years experience working woth others, or realizing that the problems he’s solved were solved decades ago and those solutions can be found in the right places, or living with the reality that out in the workforce he’s most likely not the brilliant unique snowflake his family thinks he is.

There is always more to learn in leading people and maintaining existing software. The point is that the developer had many years of practice already AND THEY ARE NOT ACKNOWLEDGED.

Surgeons don't have that expectation. They never butchered a human until their first class in medical school at 20. A developer that is a total starter, like the surgeon, will have a hard time passing any interview and landing jobs.

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