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Comment by redwards510 | Hacker News Reader

With the speed that frameworks and technologies change these days, I feel like we're all technically junior developers. Sure I have over 10 years of experience as a professional software developer, but I've only been coding in the latest flavor of .Net for the 2-4 years it's been around. Does anyone care about the five years of experience with Web Forms back before ASP.MVC was popular? Or my years of experience with 3rd-party tool X that no one uses anymore? What about Bootstrap or JQuery?

We all only have about two years of experience with whatever the hot new language is before it changes to something else.

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That isn't really how anyone worth impressing judges work experience.

Those kind of resumes where you have like 18 years of work experience in 9 different language, but you were essentially not much more than a junior dev in any one of them, are very unimpressive.

That is the typical career story and that's why a lot of people struggle to find dev jobs when they get older because they weren't managing their career and were just riding the technology churn with all the other 23 year olds.

You should think of your career progression as every couple of years you are making a jump up to either more responsibility, or a more difficult domain, or working on systems with more load etc ...

If you don't make these forward progressions you will be judged harshly as an older person, because it's very difficult for people to NOT think, "well why didn't this person make any progress in their career? They must suck."

The technologies used is a side detail, it's never the "meat" of your work experience.

You make it sound trivial but the fact is that you're hired to do a job. Most likely if you don't go find another job every 2 years then you will not be progressing because many companies will not give you more responsibility or more difficult things to do. And then if you jump ship every two years they judge you for not sticking around and you will be docked for that. In the end I have seen plenty of companies hire older workers as just developers. If you want something higher then you have to be an expert in a domain... this again limits the number of jobs available to you.

> go find another job every 2 years

this actually isn't bad advice

> companies will not give you more responsibility or more difficult things to do

i find this is true only in large corporate enterprises. or a lack of initiative on the employee themself. you won't find this in startups / younger / tech focused companies

> If you want something higher then you have to be an expert in a domain

yes generally if you want higher responsibility you need to be able to execute on those responsibilities...

> many companies will not give you more responsibility

You don't get responsibility. You take responsibility.

Of course this is harder in large companies, but it's equally important.

>You don't get responsibility. You take responsibility.

Underrated advice, right here. It's not always easy or gratifying, but it's served me well over the past 20 years.

I agree with this, I guess. But I've always thought of it as "assuming" more responsibility. Subtle difference.

I think you're misinterpreting what he means. Every couple years you should be just evaluating whether you're taking on more responsibilities or you're working on genuinely more difficult/complex problems. If you're not, you need to show aptitude at your current company so you get placed to do it, or if it's the case that the company is the issue and not you, then you should consider moving on.

If there is a path of progression for you in terms of responsibility and difficulty of work, then by all means stay at a company for several years.

Within this framework it doesn't mean you'll necessarily be moving companies every 2 years.

Can I pay you as if you only actually have been typing code for the length of time you have been using the framework I am building my current project with? Do you not feel that after learning 10 different frameworks over 10 years that you can pick up new ones faster and become more proficient than a truly noob who has only been coding professionally for 2 years? The value in a senior dev is the experience they have in quickly learning new concepts and the speed at which they apply those.

For me, I think an experienced developer brings more than just knowledge of frameworks to the game. They bring domain knowledge, transferable skills, they know how to model code, they know how do do things like separation of concerns.

They can write readable maintainable code. They can clearly communicate to the non-technical people to get the business requirements out, knowing how to cut to the chase.

They should also able to help other developers get up to speed and pick up (the gist at least) of new frameworks and understand the abstractions they use.

I regularly work with developers like this and it's thoroughly enjoyable.

Maybe senior/junior tied to any specific language doesn't make a lot of sense. Not like an electrician goes back to apprentice when a new type of breaker or romex type comes out. The foundations of the profession are in something more general than language.

Not if you are an enterprise developer that work on a long lived stack like SAP.

It is slowly changing in our world but very very slowly ... Javascript is actually being mentioned at conferences now.

This is how it feels to me as well. I’m using AWS now, having never used it previously, and when I mention WinForms and WPF to the younger guys I’m met with blank stares.

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