kunal ghosh <kunal...@gmail.com> writes: > Hi all, > > I read a lot of emails in this list and others, posting job offerings. > They all list, "years of experience" required by a candidate to be > considered for the job. > > But what is the metric to measure this experience. If it indirectly > means , "corporate experience" ( in django , etc ) does it mean that > free and open source developers who use these technologies in their > free time (and not in their day jobs) are NOT experienced ? Even > though they might have worked with those technologies for a much > longer duration than the "experienced" ones ? > > looking for comments, suggestions and constructive criticism.
I've generally felt that "years of experience" is a poor metric to filter people with. It's easy to rack up a few while not doing anything useful. I spent a year at a company early in my "career" clicking "Start" 2 times a week and sending an email. Later, I interviewed someone who had 3 years of UNIX experience who didn't know the difference between a hard link and a copy of a file. In older times, when people worked in factories, the number of years of experience you had were a decent metric. You couldn't get that kind of experience except on a factory floor and the work was repetitive enough that the more raw time you spent doing a job, the better you'd get at it. The HR departments being the kind of people they are translate this to the software world. Of course, the amount of time people spend doing stuff does help them to get better at it but in the software world, you'll have to account for "free time" and time spent in college working on things. The "years of experience in the industry" doesn't really work for that. You'll have to use a different metric. -- ~noufal http://nibrahim.net.in "Triumph without Victory, The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War", -Headline published in the U.S. News & World Report, 1992. _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
