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Comment by chriszf | Hacker News Reader

Not that this is the case here (indeed, I <3 Karl Seguin), but I find this mantra being used by mediocre developers to cover their ignorance more and more these days. Yes, learning is more important than knowing, but that doesn't excuse you from knowing, especially the basics. Claim you're a senior web developer, and I expect you to know how to do CSS/JS/HTML. I expect you to have a reasonable idea of how to deploy your app to production. I expect you to know how to write raw sql to get around the leaky abstraction that is your ORM. The sad truth is that I've interviewed more than enough 'senior developers' who couldn't do any of these things. "I don't know, but I can learn," they say. You've been doing this for five years, shouldn't you have learned these things by now?

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Right, but you're making a completely false dichotomy ...

Actually, the problem you described as nothing to do with what the OP mentions. You might even have a bigger chance to attract those profiles with an ad that specifically targets a language than by being broader.

So, yes, of course, if you call yourself a senior programmer in something, you should actually know the technology, but once again, it's not the point of the OP

Sorry, it was a sleepy comment in the early hours of the morning. I don't mean to present it as contrary to Seguin's article. It's simply a side-conversation about the (perceived) rising usage of the phrase by unskilled developers.

Exactly. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? How do you tell when a person actually gone through learning experiences (which is how one acquires knowledge) and isn't actually just padding their resume?

I was going to include this like my my original post, not sure why I ultimately decided not to. But, I think to answer how to hire, I'd start with this simple post from 37 Signals:

https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3071-why-we-dont-hire-progra...

Here to confirm the same thing from the school side. It may be true, but it's a terrible thing to tell yourself as an excuse for being ignorant or inattentive. Unfortunately I think teachers (at the undergraduate level anyway) are too complacent when it comes to this attitude and for some people it leaves them 4/5 years older and more mature, but not more skilled (except at Google or maybe JSTOR searches).

Hah, I guess I can start marketing myself a Senior Web Developer now - despite only one year's experience outside of university.

Agreed. There is a difference between someone who has become an expert in any topic and can demonstrate a willingness to dig down into that space, and someone who has just taken the surface path. The former probably can learn, the latter may require more teaching effort than it's worth.

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