What does N years of experience with a language really mean?
- by marcgg
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 /
