Thirty Years Of Learning Nothing

The Algorithm brought me this job ad:

I remember these ads from the dot-com days, demanding decades of experience with tooling that was barely a couple of years old at that point. Of course it’s funny, but there is also a deeper point here.

Hiring based on experience with a single technology, especially at senior levels, is generally a mistake. Expertise that specialised is generally project-based, and brought on as consultancy for the duration of the project. Senior staff members need to be generalists.

Let’s go through why that is:

• Assume you are going to retain this person for X years; you should have this figure already, as part of your calculations for whether to hire a permanent staffer in the first place, as opposed to a temporary consultant.
• Now sit down with your enterprise architects and look back at what your internal tech stack looked like X years ago.
• I am willing to bet good money that some core tech will still be the same, but lots of components around that core will have changed, perhaps multiple times.
• If you had hired someone who was only conversant with your tech stack of X years ago, how useful would they be today?

Also, that way you won’t get people making fun of your job description on the internet.