What does N years of experience with a language really mean?

Question

I've been looking at jobs descriptions since I'm graduating soon and looking for a job and what's always coming back - I'm not teaching you anything - is the "N years of experience in this language".

It has been discussed in this question that if you work professionally with let's say Ruby for 2 years, but during these two years you also did some C# and PHP and were actually coding in Ruby 50% of the time. Do you say you have 1 year of experience in Ruby? 2 years?

Another issue that hasn't been reviewed in the other post is for "non-professional experience". I'll give you a personal example:

I've been working with Ruby on Rails since 2004 while at school. I did a lot of personal projects and school projects using this technology. I also used Rails in 2 6-month internships. Do I have 5 years of Rails experience (2004-now)? Do I have 1 year(2 internships)? Do I have nothing?

I feel like I don't deserve the credit for 5 years, because the first years I wasn't working a lot with rails, but since last year I launched some websites and invested myself a lot in this technology and just saying 1 year doesn't really reflect how much I know the technology...

Another example:

I Learned C++ at school and did 1 big project with it (2-3 month of work and a semester of classes). I never used it in a company but I'd be able to be productive fairly quickly if I had to work on a C++ project and I have a good grasp of the concepts. Do I have no experience? 3 months? 6 months? ... something else?

---

What I'm really trying to do is to find a way to present my skill set in a way that is compliant to what recruiters expect. I also don't want to end up at an interview that would go something like this...

Recruiter (finding out the horrible truth): Oh but you said that you had 2 years of experience with this when you have none!

/ slaps me in the face /

Me (in pain): Oh! The irony!

Recruiter (yelling): Get out of my office

/ calls security, punches me in the throat /

Answer 1

Write whatever you can say with a straight face, and defend, if asked to.

Answer 2

I take N years to honestly mean "N years of (some meaningful) work in". You do not need to deprecate the # of years worked by % time, unless the work you did in that language is extremely minimal.

However, if you mention any language at all on your resume and claim competance you'd better be comfortable with it. Anything you mention on your resume is fair game for an interview question.

Answer 3

Experience usually means work experience, not school experience. The best thing you can do is to be honest. Take it from someone who has interviewed many people with "padded" resumes - interviewers can see dishonesty coming a mile away.

Let me reiterate: the best thing you can do is be totally honest. Your best selling point now is not your experience because you don't really have any. Your selling point now is going to be a mix of enthusiasm, good attitude, hard work, and a willingness to learn. An interviewer will know that you are fresh out of school and as such they aren't going to expect much experience. They will be looking for someone they can train - someone with a good work ethic and attitude.

Answer 4

For my current job (which I started during my last year of school), I was supposed to have 2 years experience in C#. In reality, I had 0 since I never worked with C# professionally before that. I had made simple programs on my own and read some books, but beyond that nothing besides PHP and C++.

If you can convince the interviewer that you can learn the language quickly, have a positive attitude, and don't smell bad you should be fine.

Answer 5

if you do C#, JavaScript, html, CSS and SQL development for 3 years and you spend a significant amount on each I would list all of them for 3 years Later during the technical interview they will find out if you DO or DO NOT know your stuff

Answer 6

Put yourself in the position of someone recruiting. They cannot specify shades of grey, they have got to find a succinct shorthand for what they are looking for.

If they are specifying 2 years experience of a language, then they need someone self-sufficient who not only knows the syntax, but knows how to write business-quality code. Who won't need hand-holding, who in fact can guide less experienced developers

If those interships were solid development activity and produced something that works and was used, then I'd believe they are full-value for their elapsed time. If instead you had been doing professional programming for a year, 50% on Ruby, 50% something else, I'd count that.

Hobbyest stuff, solo projects, education projects usually have lower value. Of course there will be a Bill Gates who wrote a sold something, and if you have a story that can make more of the early stuff then great, count it.

Answer 7

I'd say the question was pretty well answered in your link.

I definitely wouldn't list college experience as job experience as that's what most job listings are referring to. As long as you have actively used whatever language or technology you are listing it doesn't and shouldn't matter what amount of time you spent working with each over that period of time.

Answer 8

My read or opinion is that if you have been using a tool for 5 years. And say every year for a decent percentage of the year (e.gy 10-20% of your coding time not all of your time, design, ect..).

Then you've been using that tool for 5 years.

Answer 9

You could just say: 4 years personal experience and 1 year experience of using it in a professional environment in your internship.

Then the interviewer can decide for himself how he wants to weight your experience.

Answer 10

My first principle of resume writing is to be honest.

My second principle is to make things look as favorable as possible, without violating my first principle.

The resume is no place to be modest, or to run the risk of understating your qualifications. Pretty much nobody else will be doing this, and you're in competition with everybody else. Lots of people will be lying, but I wouldn't lie for several reasons, one of them being the possibility of getting into real trouble.

Therefore, you have a year of experience in Ruby. If you worked in C off and on during those internships, you've got a year of experience in C (as long as you can answer questions about C). You don't have any actual work experience with C++ (unless you got paid for something involving it), but it shouldn't hurt to list it as something you've been exposed to.

The purpose of the resume is to get to the interview, or at least the phone screening, without getting you in trouble. Bear in mind that you may well be asked about anything on your resume, and if you've puffed yourself up as having years of experience in Intercal and you can't tell the interviewer what the "#" character is called (the mesh operator), you've just blown the interview, even if the job has nothing to do with Intercal.

Answer 11

Six months after Java was released, you could find job reqs demanding 2 years of Java experience. True story.

The point being, many job reqs are not written by developers themselves. The n-years "requirement" is commonly just an aggressive HR tatic. The goal is to scare away more of the unqualified candidates.

Answer 12

My answer is avoid using "years" as a descriptor for how well you know a technology, until you absolutely can't avoid it.

• In your resume, list languages in context of the projects you've used them in. Avoid an arbitrary laundry list of languages and years (or "levels"), even if most resume examples you've seen do so. Laundry lists suck. Give just enough information about your background to make people curious. Projects/accomplishments "implemented in x" are more interesting than a set of strings that correspond to names of technologies.
• If you're responding to ads that demand "1-2 years experience" in a particular language, you'll be fine, as long as you can answer most of the idiomatically interesting questions that are usually asked about that language. Straight out of college, avoid answering ads that demand 3-5 or 5+ years experience, unless you happen to be a rockstar and have developed something really complicated already that would make industry veterans jealous.
• If you're talking to an arbitrary recruiter who'll only pass you along to the next person if you tell them how many years experience you have, say "1-2 years" if you're reasonably comfortable in the language, but never did anything very hard in it. Say "3 years" if you've implemented anything that requires a great deal of nitty-gritty understanding of the technology in question. Say 5 or more years if you wouldn't mind being asked how feature X is implemented in that technology stack and what its limitations are, where X is anything that the average veteran user would know is important about that technology.