Programming Job Applications - Years of Experience?

Question

I'm currently applying for jobs, and they all require "X Years Experience in Y technology".

My question is, is there some standard way of measuring X?

For example, I have used C# professionally for 4 years, however it represented maybe 1/3rd of the work I was involved in during those years.

Do I therefore put "4 years C# experience", or "1.2 years C# experience"?

Following the first route sounds more impressive, but if you add all the numbers up for all the other technologies, you end up with a number far greater than the actual number of years I've been working for...

Following the second route however sounds bad (1.2 years is a smaller number of years than 4), and I also believe paints me in a bad light. I believe that I've learnt much more about C# over the course of 4 years part-time than I would have learnt had I done 1.2 years in a single solid block.

I'd appreciate hearing people's thoughts on this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you were doing a decent (use discretion -- 1/3 is more than enough IMO) bit of it, go with 4 years.

Answer 2

Measuring experience by years is already a rough benchmark, so I don't think you should worry too much. Go with 4 years, but be prepared to talk about "what you like/dislike about C#" or "what's your greatest achievement using C#" type of question. I'd expect some good answers from a 4th year person.

Answer 3

You would put the length of time since you started using it. For example, I've been a professional web developer for about 10 years. That's 10 years HTML, 10 years Javascript, about 9 years with ASP, 8 years with PHP, 6 years with C#, 4 years with CSS.. etc. It's not supposed to add up to the amount of time you've been working since many of these skills are used together.

Answer 4

I can't imagine the math involved in figuring how much of my last X years of work was involved in technology X versus technology Y versus methodology Z. Do you subtract the percentage of the workday you spent in meetings?

There's some common sense involved; if you wrote one Perl script in 2007, you don't have a year's worth of Perl experience. But if you spent two years developing and maintaining a database-driven website, you can honestly say that you have two years experience each with ASP.NET and SqlServer.

Answer 5

It seems completely random.

People tend to round up. I have seen people use Years Experience to mean number of years since they first used the technology, including 2 semesters of study which they count as one year.

So if you round down too much you are probably under selling yourself.

You have to be able to answer the questions in the interview. If you are confident you can meet the requirements of the job description then why not round up.

Answer 6

I think you have to see it from the hiring company's point of view. In the end those are just numbers that are used to filter out completely inexperienced developers.

AFAIK nobody works with just one language or platform. To be honest I think most of my programming work is interaction with other coworkers. If you go with option one, job ads that require 20 years of experience are supposedly asking for 40+ years of experience... and you can be pretty certain that that isn't the case.

In other words it's more of an estimate. If you think your experience and expertise would match 4 years' of non-exclusive experience in that field, feel free to write it down. When asked, you can always explain how you calculated that number...

HTH

Answer 7

If people don't specifically ask you to fill out a time frame on the resume or application, then I would leave it blank. In your skills section, list all technologies and tools that you have used in work or on your own that you can talk about intelligently.

In your work experience section, list your major accomplishments and try to put the technologies that you have used there so they know the kinds of things that you have used with those technologies.

If a company is trying to pin you down to an exact number on an application, then that may be a red flag. Once someone has had 6 months of solid experience with something, they are either good at it, or they aren't. There are people with 10 years of experience in X who have been doing things the same way for that many years, so the metric is really a bad one, and if a job harps on that then that might be a red flag. To quote David Laribee, “There are Junior programmers with 20 years experience.”

In my experience, what they say on the requirements and what they are actually looking for are usually two different things. Use their requirements as a general guide, but not the law.

Answer 8

You're on the right track.

There is no silver bullet to this.

My rule of thumb is to apply the following to the candidates experience. Can they demonstrate with regards to a particular technology:

• the learning process they went through
• the areas/range of exposure they have had
• give examples that show a depth of knowledge

...which are consistent with the time they claim they have done it.

You could easily demonstrate your 4 years of experience by talking about the various projects you have done over the past 4 years.

This will also help you communicate your depth of knowledge by describing different things you learned in each project. By the time you finish describing these things, you've put some great context around what your 4 years of experience means!

If you think of it this way, that helps when you put the number on your resume, because you know you can back it up.

Good luck! Let us know how you go :)

Answer 9

I'd say give the number of years [commercial] experience with a technology, followed by some sort of weighting.

You might want to use something like: 'C# - 4 yrs - Intermediate Skill' or 'Advanced'/'Practitioner' etc. It likely can't hurt to give readers an idea how you feel about your overall confidence with the technology.

I've seen this used in "skills matrixes" where a candidate has given an overview of their knowledge of languages/products, number of years experience and confidence with each entry.

Be careful with rating each skill/product with a number (say out of 10).

This can be misinterpreted! a 9/10 might suggest a mastery of a technical skill where in reality it might be used to show confidence in that particular technology over another on the list.

Answer 10

"years" is subjective. Someone learning how to turn on a computer in one year might be brilliance to one, but complete WTF to another.

my suggestion - put the years of experience that you feel comfortable with, and that you can back up.

(someone who digs into the core of php code in one year will arguably be more expirienced than someone that has refered to php.net for function reference the past 5 years)

Answer 11

The <x> years of experience is used by HR and recruiters to be able quantify the unmeasurable. It's so they can filter people out without actually having to know anything about the subject area.

It's going to be a blunt gauge for how deep your knowledge should be

• less than a year? You have some exposure, maybe maintained someone else's code and can at least scan through some code for the really smelly areas
• 1-2 years? You've probably built some projects from scratch, can refactor existing code, able to predict problem points when presented with a spec - and importantly probably has collection of snippets to drop in.
• more than 2 - you're either an expert or realised that that language isn't for you and wouldn't want the job anyway.

Ultimately, quoting years experience is pointless. If a recruiter asks me (as an interviewee) I'll reply with a little more than they're asking; as an interviewer I'll make something up.

Once you're in a decently technical interview you and your interrogator will be able to get to grips with whether you know enough about the subject for their liking.

Answer 12

You should put the time that you started using the technology, only including those years during which you actively used the technology.

For example, I learned Perl in 1997, but I haven't used it at all past 1999. Even though I learned Perl 11 years ago, I would list my Perl experience as 2 years.

On the other hand, I also learned Java in 1997, and I've used it ever since - although there could be weeks during which I don't do any development work. I would definitely list myself as having 11 years of Java experience.