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Comment by rabble | Hacker News Reader

I've got more than 10 years of rails experience. I started with Rails 0.5 in July 2004. So looking at the calendar we're at 10.5 years. There were only like 5 people including DHH when i joined the #rubyonrails irc channel. And on top of that i've done lots of other things in the rails world, like managing people since then. The thing is, rails has changed so much, i'm not sure how much value there is in that. If i were hiring it'd be a red flag that somebody only stayed doing rails for 10 years. A good developer learns new languages and frameworks. A language a year and all that.

Perhaps the hiring drone was saying 10 years of web development experience maybe?

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  > The thing is, rails has changed so much, i'm not sure how 
  > much value there is in that.

To corroborate this point: I've been doing Rust for over three years now, but if you think that knowing Rust circa Oct 2011 gives you any friggin clue how to write the language today, you're extremely out of the loop.

The same can be said for C++ (which is pivoting toward a massively different style with C++11), Java (unless, like so many I've encountered, you think the language and its surrounding ecosystem hasn't changed a whit since 2002), Python... heck even PHP is changing its basic character over time, if slowly.

I have 2.5 years Rails experience and use/maintain apps all the way from 1.2.6 to 4.2. Using the older versions has given me a real clear picture of the the framework as a whole; where it's been and where's it's going. I think having this experience is highly valuable.

"A language a year" is pretty pointless, especially if practice in any given language is not good.

You might be surprised. New languages can teach you quite a lot more than simply a new syntax - there are concepts that will be present and visible in a new language or stdlib that you might not have encountered before, and constant exposure to unfamiliar territory helps to keep you in constant learning mode.

The idea isn't that you abandon your existing languages every year. Nobody will be effective if they're always working exclusively in a language they've just started with, but you can take lessons learned in a new toy language and apply them to your broader work as a programmer, even if you never use that language again.

What can a person with 10 years of experience in a framework know that someone with 2 doesn't?

I'd be one of those folks in already #rubyonrails at the time. :)

Or maybe 10 years between the both of them?

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