> fulfilling to tackle a new project and a new tech stack every 18 months.
That's not what I mean by 1 year of experience 10 times. That's 1 year of experience with specific technologies, which nobody except recruiters and HR people looking to mindless fill out a job description care about.
By 1 year of experience 10 times, I mean working in the same ecosystem, doing coding but never really going beyond that. It seems like there's always someone in every position I've had. They have a long resume, but look at their code or their overall development practices and you'd think it came from a junior coder new to the industry.
Establishing yourself through learning a new tech stack every so often is fine – as long as you demonstrate that your skills as a developer have grown. Going from not owning any specific area of the code, helping in other people’s areas, fixing bugs, making small modifications, and implementing very small features to owning an entire product, in all aspects of the development process, providing technical direction to others, doing design and making architectural-level decisions is establishing yourself.
I've just found the idea of "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" at a dissonance with an industry very much oriented around staffing individual projects.
I agree, as long as you're building those skills of ownership, that's progression. I've just had many say you need to stay at a place 5 years to do that, which is crazy to me.
Oh no, it's definitely ok to move around and change technologies. In fact, it's probably an advantage to know 1-2 really deeply but have familiarity with more.
Another way to look at it, is that it's a local maximum. You're right that it is high-paying and fulfilling to keep learning new things. And I felt pretty down about myself for a while because I was pretty focused on some things that seem lame on HN (FORTRAN, Old-school C++, etc.). But in the last few years my career has matured and now I feel more secure in my 26 years of experience in a pretty narrow field. I really do have lots of fun and fulfillment at work solving hard problems, but to get here I needed the dedicated experience to have enough context to be efficient at what I do.
I guess, what I'm saying, is just be careful not to get stuck in an ADHD local maximum where you're getting a dopamine hit for jumping to the next new thing. Sometimes taking the time to become a real expert in something can pay off on a longer time scale.
*I'm not saying that it's bad to have 1 year of experience n times, you're probably pretty good at getting up to speed - you have n years of experience of learning new things, and that is also valuable in many contexts. I'm just saying that it can be a local maximum.
> I guess, what I'm saying, is just be careful not to get stuck in an ADHD local maximum where you're getting a dopamine hit for jumping to the next new thing. Sometimes taking the time to become a real expert in something can pay off on a longer time scale.
> I'm not saying that it's bad to have 1 year of experience n times, you're probably pretty good at getting up to speed - you have n years of experience of learning new things, and that is also valuable in many contexts. I'm just saying that it can be a local maximum.
That's a really great way to phrase it, thank you.
It's definitely like that now I think about it... although I do see many engineers get caught working in bad environments because they choose too early.
I would also that the benefit is not only better pay, but also being able to onboard efficiently and working with varying styles of orgs and people. If you work at a single place for a very long time, you get used to the way people work, think, approach problems. It's really nice to see how 'others' do it, what 'others' think, validate what you know and do.
