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Comment by dreen | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole X years of experience with kind of silly anyways? You grow as a programmer by exposing yourself to new ideas and ways of doing things, but this pretty much gives you a low number of years in a bunch of stuff, not impressive on a resume.

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I have become less and less convinced on this. Most recently I had choices for what would ostensibly be a Go-centric job between generalists who had a little Go experience, and people really good at Go, but not as much at the rest of our stack.

We went with the generalist under the theory you’re advocating and it was a disaster. The people we hired learned Go, but it takes a while to grok the paradigms and really develop a mental model for what’s going on under the hood. Those hiring choices cost us a lot of grief and probably several months of development time as they made choices that were ostensibly reasonable in other languages/frameworks, but didn’t necessarily hold in Golang.

In the future if I require someone for something specific, say k8s, I’m hiring someone with direct lengthy experience in k8s and not a devops expert who has some experience with k8s.

The optimal strategy depends on the timeframe in which you're looking for the employee to provide a net contribution and how long you expect them to stay, among other particulars.

If you're scaling up quickly or employing a bunch of people to immediately work on a new project, and expect them to stay an average of 2 years, you need preexisting experience.

If you're in a company where people stay on average 4-5 years and, and there's already a well established team with a good set of conventions and technical leadership, a generalist is probably a better call.

Well there is no silver bullet right, and there are many factors in a situation like yours.

Lets say you're hiring for a Java position to make web apps. Is a better candidate someone with lots of desktop Java experience, or someone with lots of Django experience? The answer is of course, it depends. On the person, the job etc. I'd interview both and it's probable the second person has more relevant skills.

The problem with putting emphasis on years of experience is that the second person might not get through the HR filter.

Is it normal for one experience to guide all future hiring decisions?

Obviously it is better if the candidate has experience in the specific work, but you didn't chose between two generally good candidates but with and without that experience did you?

Silly and in the UK, quite possibly illegal. It can be discriminatory against younger applicants, so you need a really good reason to be asking for x years of experience.

+100, person.

Some people drive cars their whole lives and still get nervous in parking lots, freeways. Some kids are competent sliding on snow at 60 mph on mtn passes. Time doing is ridic.

While I agree, that example isn't very accurate. They're not saying they just want experience in programming, but k8s. So that'd be like them saying they don't want x years driving, but x years drifting on snowy mountain passes.

Going fast is not the only metric to use to hire someone. To use your example, you might be a great driver that can go 60mph on the snow but you drive the same way when there's traffic on the street, you're basically unaware of the problems you can cause.

This is true in the same way on engineering. Too many kids deploy feature and release it in production without testing or without accounting edge cases that at scale cause massive problem to the user base. While this could not be a problem in a startup it's a big issue in traditional corporation and where error are not an option (you wouldn't consider giving the software of a medical device to somehow who has demonstrates skills but don't know what issues may cause)

Like an African proverb says: If you want go fast, go alone. If you want go far go together

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