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Comment by StaticRedux | Hacker News Reader

3+ years doesn't mean 3+ years "in a job". That makes no sense. (Well, maybe for some companies it does, but you don't want to work there anyways). For some reason people can never get over that.

It means 3+ years with a technology. It means don't walk in the door out of a Java college having used nothing else and apply to work on a Triple A game written in C++. It means don't show up after a weekend html course and apply for a job using Node/React. And before you say "well that isn't me for so and so reason", it happens ALL the time to employers.

An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch. It means that you are at least capable enough to work on small or easy problems and features and an employer or other devs can coach you along the way and you'll know what they are saying to you.

That's all it means (to any reasonable employer).

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Bull. I've been using Python since high school, but very few employers I've ever spoken to were willing to actually label me as having any years of experience in Python.

Did you have anything to show for your work since high school? Any projects online? Github codebase?

I know a Github profile shouldn't necessarily be required to count as experience. But if your only experience is non-work related then you're probably going to want to back it up with something tangible.

I have something of a github, yes. https://github.com/esennesh

You need to be able to convince an employer that your experience is valid, that you can work on their critical code base without destroying their customer base and income stream. If you can't demonstrate your experience through results that you've achieved, that's the same as having zero years of python experience.

Sure. Demonstrate experience how? Link them to patches accepted by open source projects? IRC conversations and emails? :) (now harder with all that slack thing)

See people tend not to put patches on GitHub. (Some fork repos butit is harder for the recruiter to figure out the thing.) And there are only so many projects that are valuable at all.

If you're expected to work on yet another worthless project (TM) then the recruiters should quit. After all, they weren't working on recruiting and PR projects before they took the job. And yes, they can ruin the company just as well.

It gets even harder when you worked on a proprietary thing you cannot publish. Especially if it was freelance.

Technically breaking or not things is a matter for DevOps not developers. And anyway it is mostly a matter of mindset.

One things folks tend to overlook is the communicative aspects of the job. You can be a rock-star engineer, but if you can't deal with other folks you're in for a rough time.

To walk in off the street and convince folks you've got the chops, talk intelligently and articulately about the things you've done, the how, the why, the tradeoffs and considerations and consequently talk to them about what their working on and ask those questions or intuit answers or, problems is a very hard skill to acquire.

When I started out, sure, I could write code. Decent code, and was willing to spend a lot of time writing a lot of it. Still, and as I like to describe it, I was a coder and not an "engineer"[0]. Knowing how to bang out Python scripts, or setup a Rails app, or some Hibernate entities is fine and probably a pre-requisite but the soft-skills of knowing how to operate within an organization are also incredibly important.

When you're fresh and starting off with no real experience, passion is about the best you can demonstrate at which point you can hope the folks on the other-side of the table are able to recognize that, and willing to take a risk. For all they know, you're a petulant little shit who can't hack it on the job site.

[0] - I still feel weird calling myself that since I know "real" engineers, but that's my title...

> Sure. Demonstrate experience how?

That's the point. If a candidate can't concisely state how they solved a problem or the effect of their having done so, then they likely didn't solve a problem in the first place.

The barrier to entry represented by using Github is incredibly low, so that isn't a differentiator between people in most cases. What was _accomplished_ by all those pull requests and managed repositories?

> Link them to patches accepted by open source projects? IRC conversations and emails? :) (now harder with all that slack thing)

In many cases, those are just about the least worthwhile thing you can do to convince a potential employer. Employers are busy, almost always busier than the candidates who are looking for a job. Make things easier for the employer, not harder.

> The barrier to entry represented by using Github is incredibly low

Related to this, I hate how merely opening an issue is shown as a contribution on the offending user's profile.

Some script-kiddie who can't bother to read opens an issue with a "Gimme teh codez" beg, and now it shows that they "contributed" to my project That's not a contribution, that's the damn opposite! I've had my time wasted!

>It gets even harder when you worked on a proprietary thing you cannot publish.

Which is, you know, the modal case.

Their statements aren’t unique to tech. 3+ years of experience were not restricted to three years -with a technology-. I saw the same shit back when I was doing healthcare QI, and there is no tech to speak of there.

In fact, they stated nothing to suggest they were looking at tech firms specifically. You seem to be reading into this what you want to see.

I'm speaking on the subject based on experience in my own field (I don't presume to know other fields). But I believe what I said applies anywhere.

> An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch.

in most fields it means exactly that - or it means "there is a well known educational syllabus that you have already followed and the next X years are the well known practical side of that education. At the end you will be rewarded with membership of a profession"

it works for lawyers, civil engineers and accountants. not for software engineers it seems.

Layers and accountants have specific post-graduate examinations. Doctors and dentists have an extended education combined with on-the-job training.

In the UK engineers can apply for chartered status, which assesses professional experience.

The reason software developers have none of these things is because the entry qualification for some jobs is "I know some javascript", while for others it's a post-graduate understanding of statistical distributions and vector calculus.

There's no professional accreditation system, no reliable way to assess professional competence, and a lot of the tools (and ideas, and systems) are hacked together with no formal rigour by people who like solving puzzles more than they like making things that work reliably.

You're imagining reasonable behavior, but that's demonstrably not what's going on. We've all seen job ads that request more years of experience in a technology than the technology has existed.

These are just number made up on the spot by people who can't be bothered to think about it.

Maybe every employer I've talked to is unreasonable.

When a job lists a requirement for 2-3 years experience, it means 2-3 years of industry experience.

I don't have 10 years of Python experience because I started coding when I was a teenager.

I learned more about programming in Ruby from 6 months on the job than I learned about Python from 3 years of using it at university.

You are missing the point. The article is not referring specifically to tech jobs.

> That's all it means (to any reasonable employer).

There's the rub. Early in my career when I had little working experience this CONSTANTLY bit me. It didn't matter that I did consulting on the side or that I worked with the technology or even that I went to school and used the technology there.

In my experience almost all of non-tech companies and maybe half-ish of the tech companies would require the experience be on the job at a company.

Now I don't know how indicative my experience is. I don't know if this type of information is tracked anywhere.

As an aside I'll never forget the one company I applied for who was looking for a developer with 5+ years experience in using .Net Framework... in 2003.

Funny. Were they looking for a dev that worked at Microsoft Research?

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