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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

As an old boss of mine said when hiring, "Does this person have ten years' experience? Or one year's experience, ten times?".

What he meant (i think!) was that someone who's been doing something for ten years might not know any more than someone who's been doing it for a year - they've just been doing the same thing over and over again.

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To understand this phrase, think of grades 1-12.

"Did this person graduate from high school, or did they take the first grade twelve times?"

Both students have 12 years' classroom experience, but one knows more than the other.

Unless you want an expert in first grade I suppose!?

Which is how you end up with stack-specific experts. Which, hey, they know what they're doing, for sure.

He had actually a very good point (if he meant it that way). I never thought about it like that before.

Reminds me totally of today's SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3553#comic

I think your old boss's meaning was pretty much the opposite -- 10 years of deep experience in a field can be much better than 10 years spent hopping around from job to job across fields. Applied to programming, this would be something like "I want someone who has been doing ML for 10 years, not someone who has been hopping from hot trend to hot trend every year and just now happens to be doing ML".

In my experience the phrase has the meaning that twic described.

Specialization and diversification can both be good. I think it's spending 10 years making the same mistakes, not learning, that's being criticized here.

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