"This information is very important."
Years != Experience
...but thanks for confirming the shallowness of the recruiting processes we've all experienced.
Years != Experience
...but thanks for confirming the shallowness of the recruiting processes we've all experienced.
This isn't strictly about experience; it's also about whether someone a company is going to invest time in is going to stick around for a while, or is going to hop around a lot.
But regardless, years worked, when coupled with title/promotion history, is actually a decent proxy for experience. It's not perfect, but neither is the resume itself. No one is going to make a hiring decision solely on it, but it's a signal that can be useful.
I have seen quite dysfunctional toxic workplaces or teams. If you leave within one month, you have good social understanding and likely have better ethics then those who stayed. Those who stayed for long were all eventually compromised (meaning their ethics changed and they started to accept or do things they should not).
Our company have also few "trap" positions. The people there change quickly, because our hiring manager talks about positives (all true) and does not mention significant negatives. The more capable you are, the quicker you recognize the situation and leave.
It is perfectly fine to have some short stints.
At one company it took them 2 weeks to set-up my email, 3 months to decide on which project to work on and in about 6 months I was delivering something. So 6 months "experience" actually meant zero. I was ready to deliver from day 1 but...
At another company I had all the accounts created by the end of day 1, already working on bugs the second day. Some projects took 1 month in total. 6 months could mean 6 projects. The amount of skills accumulated in that time was way over the skills accumulated at the first company.
As you can see the time interval is useless. I think it's fairer if the recruiter simply rolls a dice.
I think most people's experiences of onboarding in new companies are somewhere in between, thus the tenure length provides another data point.
Furthermore, some hiring managers look for people that stick around for various reasons, e.g. hiring in that company is difficult due to bureaucracy, so knowing that somebody was at a company for two years vs 1 month is an important data point.
!Years == !Experience
It’s very hard for a SWE to have immediate impact, especially a junior one. Up to the first six months are a write-off. The next period includes their first launch and review with potentially a months long performance improvement plan.
With exceptional exceptions, longevity and impact go hand in hand and a lack of longevity at the very least poses questions. Sorry if you find that shallow.
A string of 11-13 month appointments is absolutely a non-green flag.
Then again, I guess there's junior and JUNIOR! Maybe a recent boot camp grad would have been less able to jump in.
In my experience, even if all the bureaucracy and ops goes smoothly, any kind of reasonably sized existing project will take weeks to months before one can reach anything approaching full capacity. Learning the structure of the codebase, abstractions used, testing and deployment pipelines, the who's who, protocols for dealing with issues and customers, etc. takes a lot of time, and often can't easily be batched (i.e. you won't learn as much as you need even if you read the codebase end-to-end, you'll also be learning as you do your first tasks).
I had one experience with one-day-to-full-speed onboarding in the past. That was when I was briefly borrowed to a kind of bottom-feeder software house, whose job was to take garbage projects that were outsourced to way too cheap and unskilled labor, and beating them into something mostly working. At that job, once I got necessary accounts provisioned, it was just one unending stream of pushing items on a Kanban board at high velocity. You didn't have to own anything or care about anything, just do the fastest possible change that brings some aspect of a project up to customer's spec. Ain't particularly proud of that one (though I didn't have much of a choice here, their boss was a friend of my boss and needed a favor). Ain't something I'd even consider a proper software job.
I won't speak for the GP, but I think you and I have differing definitions of "write-off". I don't consider all time spent below full capacity to be a write-off because, to me, "write-off" means "net unproductive". I believe someone should hit net productive well before it hits full capacity.
You can be very productive in your first few days, weeks and months but in terms of experience, the topic at hand, internally and externally that time doesn’t have any value on a resume.
This is on the assumption that you are looking for ‘experience’ as in experienced team developers who can focus on this particular business's goals. If you’re looking for people “experienced at writing code in [some language]“ then, yes, any time spent writing code in the job is experience.
If you work somewhere with a large code base and a fluid enough engineering team it does indeed take many months before one can see the bigger picture, and expectations of developers are set accordingly.
This is especially so with infrastructure / dev tools / internal tools where new projects are often driven by individuals. You have to use the infra itself — a lot — before you will have the insight into what can be improved.
The lack of trust is not something I'd be willing to put up with at the timescale you're describing.
Had an acquaintance recently that hired a guy that didn't pass the probation period at 2 out of 3 jobs he had. My acquaintance didn't address this at all and hired him anyway. In a few short he managed to transform in the whole office to a hard to believe toxicity and had to be let go. He made a huge scandal, tried to involve lawyers etc. Now he didn't pass probation at 3 out of 4 jobs.
Now are there reasons why you might ask someone how long they stayed at their previous job? Yes, definitely. Does that make everyone suspect automatically? Hell no.
I don't have more data on the subject, so I won't draw any definite conclusions as to whether it is warranted to base someone's professional worth on the number of years/months served. My own experience shows only a very weak correlation there, and no correlation at all between seniority within a company and said company's attempts at retaining that employee.
I've seen people who had "ten years' experience" who in reality had done the same year, ten times. I've seen people who had three years' experience but were driven, looked into things on their own initiative and who outclasses those "seniors". It all seems to depend on what you're exposed to and, lacking exposure, what you'll subject yourself to of your own accord.
Have you read any studies on the subject?