Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

Agree about the value curve. Most developers do stuff that can be learned in a few years and then they just repeat the same thing with slight variation. There are really not that many jobs where you get challenged to grow throughout your career. It’s just repetition (like most other jobs)

View on HN

Anyone in the trades is doing such a job. If you're a plumber, or electrician, or cabinet maker, or framing carpenter, or a mechanic, even if those 12 years (or 20 years or more) seem similar to people outside the field, you're learning all the time. It never stops, until you do.

It’s not like learning stops but the curve flattens out a lot. Another problem is that in tech 20 year old knowledge is worth way less than 20 year old knowledge in for example cabinet making.

> Another problem is that in tech 20 year old knowledge is worth way less

This is a widely held position, which sort of makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I'd argue that it's not true. Most of what I know now that is really valuable isn't related to the technology of today or 1986. It's related to how to work, how to design systems, how to decompose problems, how to scale, etc. etc.

I refer to my resume as "a graveyard of obsolete technologies"

I could do the same. But really, it's also my value proposition. "What's that you say? Your org has a dozen crappy systems of questionable lineage and you need to migrate to SomethingFromThisDecade? Let me pick it apart for you and we can build a plan together." It's not much, but it's honest work. (and I happen to enjoy it...so win-win)

You might be surprised at how many companies are running 10+ year old technologies that were designed around the constraints of the 10+ year old systems that they replaced. If that's your thing, you can build a pretty strong career around being the person to keep that system humming along.

But this happens in tech management too. Last 20 years: CMMI? RUP? PMI? XP? Scrum? Design Thinking? Project to product management?

Also known as "1 year of experience, 12 times" (or "2 years, 6 times")

I frequently hear that, but in practically every other profession doing the exact same thing for 20 years is still valued. And the underlying reality is you can’t do the exact same thing for 12 years in the computer field. Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time.

"Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time."

Absolutely. I will be using this one.

This is not exclusive to dev work. Same can be said of managers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com