Lazycoder

hmmmmmmmmmmm, it’s kind of a combination of all of those things. Generally when I’m looking over resumes I look at the number of years they have been developing. I also look at the kinds of projects they have worked on, the scale of the projects, and their involvement in the projects. In other words a person with 5 years of experience working on an enterprise level as a lead developer (lets say 8000+ or more users) would, in my mind, have more experience than someone with 10 years of experience at a smaller company working on internal projects as the only developer. That doesn’t mean that one is any less talented than the other, just that one has more experience. I recently interviewed two men for two positions where I work. One had 8 years of experience creating software controllers and monitors for turbines at a power plant. The other had 7 years working on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. I felt that the ex-softie had more experience even though he had fewer years under his belt just because I know what the environment he was in was like. I know what he was exposed to.

Speaking and writing matter somewhat because they help me judge their knowledge which helps me to judge how well they’ve spent their time. It usually shows that someone else has judged their experience worthy of sharing with an audience. It also shows some ambition on their part. Usually speaking and writing are a plus in my eyes and not a minus. Education doesn’t play much of a role unless they also have real world experience to go along it. Some one with a masters in CS and two years of work experience is usually less experienced in my eyes than someone with no degree but four years of real world experience. Experience doesn’t always translate into usability. I worked with one fellow who had gobs of years working on HUGE projects for Boeing, HP, IBM, and some other large companies. But he was a terrible public speaker and he over-analyzed EVERYTHING. You couldn’t get him to commit to actually writing code down, he was always refactoring what he had. Another guy sounded like he would be VERY experienced, lots of training experience, lots of articles, lots of years. But when you looked at the code he wrote you wanted to ask for some garlic bread and a nice merlot there was so much spaghetti.

It also depends on whether or not I’m thinking in terms of a specific topic. Scott Mitchell may not have been developing as many years as I have, but I would consider him FAR more experienced at using the .NET platform than I am. I’m probably more experienced than he is at using PHP. My friend Brian, who’s resume I pointed to in the “black belt VB” link is scary good with VB 5.0/6.0 and programming in general, but I have more experience with ASP.NET than he does. Even so, in general programming questions I’d defer to his knowledge. I also consider the depth of a persons knowledge when I’m think about how experienced they are. Even though we may have almost the same number of years of SDev experience, I’d consider you far more experienced than me because most of my early development experience was self-guided and on smaller, isolated projects. A lot of my early work wasn’t for pay either. Of the 10 years I’d say I have doing software development and systems work, about 8 or 9 of them have been professional and I’d really only consider like 6 of them to be high quality work. Most everything I know about networking is due to setting up LAN’s for Doom and Quake parties. Not exactly high end stuff, but configuring a LAN for a game is pretty close to configuring a LAN for a business. A lot of that experience helped me pay my way through college by working for myself. Same with writing small database applications for my undergraduate chem work, eventually that led to writing database applications for other people, that snowballed and BOOM. I’m here instead of medical school.

I almost never consider successful vs. unsuccessful. Usually those kinds of things are out of the developers hands. Plus in some cases it’s hard to define a “success”. “We launched the product and testing showed that it was stable, but the company went out of business two weeks later”. Is that successful or unsuccessful? It may be shallow, but working on a project for a Fortune 1000/500 company means more to me than working on a project for a smaller company. I’m not sure why.

How do you qualify experience?