Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

Post by PainfullyNormal » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

avgDev wrote: post #29

I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev. I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers. I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta. I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a…

Post by KronisLV » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:03 AM UTC

leaflets2 wrote: post #212

KronisLV wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone. I mean, if you work in a company/team with bad practices, then that's likely to rub off onto you and affect your further employment prospects, because it will be hard to unlearn being okay with untestable code, no documentation and even the code itself not being self-documenting where possible, the code being not scala…

It can also happen that the person learns "this doesn't work well, this also doesn't, this too -- I wish we were doing everything differently!" And later, when joining a better company, s/he more deeply understands the reasons behind their good practices -- because s/he has seen the mess, without. Having seen and lived in mistakes, is life experience, can be useful. Depends on the person

  1. that the person will be accepted into that better company, even with these pre-existing sub-optimal practices which may manifest in a coding interview or a take-home task
  2. that the person will be open to learning these better practices, instead of being set in their ways, after having had their first experiences shape their views without the desire to challenge them

Post by honkdaddy » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

mathgladiator wrote: post #159

fnbr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.

I went from CTO to SDE II, and it totally made sense. There's nothing wrong with being downleveled if you are playing a different scale game. There is a huge difference being a senior engineer working on a $5,000 system versus a $1,000,000,000 system.