Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, for a lot of the types of software roles out there, many of them only have existed in their current forms for <10 years. A person whose been working on mobile for >10 years is incredibly rare, so to even find someone who has been doing mobile programming for 5 years should be enough to call them senior given they have been working in the field for half of the time the modern concepts have been around.

View on HN

There are still many concepts that transcend the specific language / platform. As I've become more attuned to this I'm sometimes horrified by code that supposedly senior engineers write that egregiously violate separation of concerns, for example. An experienced developer who knows how to properly design and architect software should be able to jump ahead of a less experienced developer who has more years experience developing for a specific platform in my opinion but recruiters don't seem to see it this way

I agree, so maybe mobile is a bad example, but look at how different the field of data infrastructure is today than it was ten years ago. While yes, many of the old concepts still exist. A person who worked with big data for 5 years with modern distributed systems is likely more skilled in this space than someone who spent the last 10 years doing ETL jobs linking standard sql databases to columnar stores.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com