I started this blog now because I believe I’ll have more free time to devote to hobbies. I’ve just switched jobs. As I looked at my options, I read many listings for software engineers. The emphasis these listings placed on experience in a particular programming language, tool, or framework was disappointing.

Requiring that a programmer must have experience in one particular language or tool is like insisting that a waiter must have experience waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. Who cares if his experience was at a steakhouse instead? The essential skills, knowledge of how restaurants operate, and ability to deal with difficult customers are the same. If he’s thrown off because the plates have steamed crustacean on them instead of grilled cow, he’s no use to me anyway.

I’ve heard the counter-argument. “But steak and lobster have such different centers of gravity, so the plates balance differently. And it’ll cost us a lot to teach him the particular gotchas of this kind of food, like not letting the lobsters catch his fingers with their claws!” The idea here is that every language and tool has unique quirks, and that a developer must have experience with those quirks or they’ll get mired in a productivity sapping tar pit of small mistakes. There may be some truth to this argument in the first few days on the job, but not over the medium and long term.

I’m not dismissing the value of experience as a whole. The right kind of knowledge and experience are valuable. More experience working as a developer is better than less. I’m now a far better developer than I was five years ago. I’ll be better still in another decade. Domain knowledge and experience, too, are more than surface deep. Picking up a thorough understanding of a problem domain takes time, and in the meantime the less experienced programmer may do some amount of well-intentioned harm. Don’t expect someone with a background in developing UML modeling tools to produce a good design for a real-time, embedded signal processing system. Those distinctions make for better hiring criteria than years using a language or tool.
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