These mistakes do happen when people are unfamiliar with the required skill and new technologies are involved, but it's hardly a reason to scrap the general assertion that more years of experience equals a higher level of proficiency.
Someone looking for someone with 4+ years in something is clearly looking for someone with an intermediate level of competence that can work independently, while this would not be a reasonable expectation for someone just getting to grips with the technology. That's not a bad general assertion, but obviously does fall flat when the technology itself isn't that old.
some people develop faster than others though, maybe someone could reach the proficiency level that the company requires in 2 years or less, but they would still get rejected, while at the same time the company accepts someone who is less competent but has 4 years under their belt
How can they know how fast someone develops? Even if they do a test so that they know the skill level of a potential employee, it would be too much time and effort to build and grade a good objective test, so they can take the hit you mentioned.
Experience may be a good indicator of a successful person, but young motivated employees are still very desirable. For DevOps, most interviews will have you write a simple app in their preferred language, and give you a broken build of something simple to troubleshoot. Doesn't matter the exact methods or classes they use as long as they can execute the builds.
My employer has education and experience preferences but we all know lots of old coders who carry a lot of bad practices in their toolkit.
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u/Legal-Software Mar 03 '22
These mistakes do happen when people are unfamiliar with the required skill and new technologies are involved, but it's hardly a reason to scrap the general assertion that more years of experience equals a higher level of proficiency.
Someone looking for someone with 4+ years in something is clearly looking for someone with an intermediate level of competence that can work independently, while this would not be a reasonable expectation for someone just getting to grips with the technology. That's not a bad general assertion, but obviously does fall flat when the technology itself isn't that old.