Free as in Time

In a recent post, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, creator of Rails) voiced his opinion on asking for years of experience in job postings for programmers:

Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that’ll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.

I’m glad I’m not the only one thinking it. In fact, I’ve noticed that if you use a particular platform for a while, you tend to get into a rut. Over time, you pay less attention to all the little updates and changes to the platform and your working style gets rigid, as compared to when a platform or framework is new to you and you’re seeking out new knowledge and ways of working. This is just a natural consequence of moving from a primarily learning-focused approach to a getting-work-done approach to the framework.

Perhaps it’s better to have been exposed to a wider array of platforms and frameworks over a shorter period of your recent history than to have a lot of depth in any one area. At least you’ll know what’s going on in more than one camp, and can bring a wider vision to new projects… Or something like that.

Now, if only the people on the other side of the table were on board. Oh, wait, if they’re not…

In turn that means you as an applicant can use requirements like “3-5 years doing this technology” as a gauge of how clued-in the company hiring is. The higher their requirements for years of service in a given technology, the more likely that they’re looking for all the wrong things in their applicants, and thus likely that the rest of the team will be stooges picked for the wrong reasons.

Similar things can be said about organizations’ choices of technologies. The word ‘Enterprise’ comes to mind. This sort of thinking on people and technology is exactly why I read DHH and use Rails, and, frankly, why I’m not Enterprise-ready®.

In other news, this post seems to have broken my category schema. We’ll call it ‘Technology’.

Tags:   DHH · Rails · rantsNo Comments