Staff eng lies about YoE
Posted by crhumble@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 64 comments
I was recently chatting with a staff engineer at my company. When chatting with him, he said he had 9 years of experience. However, he told me he graduated 5 years ago. They decided to count their internships. It felt unethical to those who do not do that.
Have you seen this? I couldn’t help but think this person’s exaggeration of experience and hiding their graduation year on their resume/linkedin led to where they are today.
Is this the types of people ethical people compete with in the market?
eloel-@reddit
Internships are experience.
Arguably school doesn't, but even that is arguable.
DaRadioman@reddit
I mean I think experience implies work experience. So imtern? Fair albeit a bit of a stretch. School? Outright deceit.
Would lots of people do it? Sure, but if a background check doesn't show employers all the way back it might cost you that sure thing job.
janyk@reddit
How is an internship a stretch? The selling point of an internship is that it's valid work experience. And it is.
DaRadioman@reddit
Interns are rarely left to discover their own scope, they are often put on projects that are really scoped and "pre-digested" to ensure it's something they can tackle.
If you think someone who has been an intern for 5 years at various places is just as valuable as someone working as a normal engineer for that timeframe, I have a bridge I would love to fit into your investment portfolio...
janyk@reddit
Neither juniors nor even senior devs discover their own scope. That's a job typically for tech leads or product owners.
Interns should be doing the work at a level of responsibility you give to a new graduate or junior developer. Otherwise you're just setting yourself up to have poorly productive worker that you'll bitch about years later.
eloel-@reddit
That'll all depend on how you define 'experience'. "Years of Experience" doesn't mean much without a qualifier of what the experience is.
Experience working full time as a software engineer?
Experience working as a software engineer?
Experience engineering software?
Experience writing software?
Those'll all have different things count or not count towards them.
Commercial_Moment546@reddit
5 years experience and internship vs 9 years, go figure
TheOwlHypothesis@reddit
What part of this is something you are personally responsible for doing something about?
Commercial_Moment546@reddit
It would impact him directly. This kinda sentiment is how we got to this shitty job market anyway! People lying, over exaggerating, midddle men contracting agencies and of course AI (Actually Ind).
We should all be responsible as humans to be honest, fair and moral. But unfortunately has not been the case, and hence this current situation in the job market and everything overall
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
how is it lying?! They cleared an interview, yes? Many people had PhD to their experience. Many don’t. Don’t blame someone for learning how to toot their horn.
Commercial_Moment546@reddit
Saying you have 9 years of experience but actually have only 5 is not lying, got it! 😆
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
How is internship not experience?! Pretty pathetic to cry about such a thing.
Commercial_Moment546@reddit
😂 tattled mf is rattled 😂
overzealous_dentist@reddit
Why wouldn't internships count? Were they not engineering internships?
SuhDudeGoBlue@reddit
Unless they were working those internships full-time throughout all 4 years, of college, it isn’t 4 years of xp.
A 12-week summer internship is 3 months of xp.
nullbyte420@reddit
Why does experience have to be counted in full time years? Can a person working part time never build experience? What a silly proposition.
DaRadioman@reddit
Turns out the actual hours put in matter too. 5 years of working a weekend or two a year won't get you much improved...
The same applies to part time or in this case internships. Fair to count, but should be at time equivalents to full time work, or called out as part time/internships/with dates
nullbyte420@reddit
Yes they should of course be labeled as internships on the resume, but who in their right mind says "I have 5 years of experience and 4 part time years of experience and 2 years of internship experience (4 years but only 20 hours per week)" when asked conversationally. That comes off really autistic.
DaRadioman@reddit
No you don't generally care that much to try hard, and you skip mentioning whatever work times that are too much of a pain, or figure out a rough honest length and use that.
In normal conversations you don't bring up YoE, or debate what other people claim...
crossmirage@reddit
They just said it isn't 4 years of experience. E.g. based on that logic, since I worked 20 hours/week for a couple years in college, it would probably be more fair to count it as 1 year of experience.
nullbyte420@reddit
That's going to be really complicated to calculate "just to be fair". And nobody hiring you cares about that calculation. If someone did that when I was hiring, I'd probably assume they were pretty weird and extremely rigid with a poor sense of communication skills and a propensity to righteous anger.
eloel-@reddit
Some schools/programs/cultures have internship be 6 month to a year, where you work 2-3 days a week and study the other 2-3. I'd say that counts for the full time.
nullbyte420@reddit
Of course it does. And years of experience are a shitty measurement of skill anyway. It's just a way to frame your level of competence in a simple manner to management.
eloel-@reddit
YoE is an indicator of if you're going to need training on the job, not of skill.
If you have 10 YoE, you won't need training on the job, whether or not you're good at the job. You might just suck at it, but training won't fix that.
nullbyte420@reddit
Exactly.
reddituser48253@reddit
I mean internships don’t count as professional experience for experienced developers but I surely don’t actually care. If someone can do the job who gives a shit how long they have been in their career
NatoBoram@reddit
You do the same shit as juniors in internships, it's very much work experience
reddituser48253@reddit
I both agree and disagree lol
Agree: internships provide professional experience that definitely give you a head start when you get out of school in terms of understanding the work place, and you get to often do really interesting projects
Disagree: read any (entry or mid level) job description these days and seemingly 90% of them explicitly disallow counting internships. The corporate world doesn’t count that experience as a collective
In any case, I think the original post said 9 YOE when it was really 5? Because of internships. I think we can agree that is pretty dishonest
Famous-Test-4795@reddit
I guess because some would argue that internships are more curated and structured, though many are not.
Hey, if I was demeaned or belittled for my internship experience or if I have to make myself small to appease people who point this stuff out to me proactively without me even saying a word about what I think about myself, then other people should have to deal with it too. Granted, I’m a woman so of course I’m going to be criticized unsolicited.
It’s time for the downvotes.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
Questionable posts from this user:
TheOwlHypothesis@reddit
lmao, gottem
crhumble@reddit (OP)
Been having a hard time, was not trying to rage bait. ill be more conscious
gdinProgramator@reddit
The hero we need
morswinb@reddit
Quite common actually.
People adding up unpaid summer internships as full years of experience to inflate their numbers is common.
It also follows being "too Senior" to do grout work status, requesting more headcount, while never actually delivering anything.
This is how the incompetent devs run up the ladder, leaving the scorched earth and tech behind.
Personally I can tell someone is bad if their first sentence is "I have x years of experience". Real experienced devs don't want to count the years anymore, but would rather trade some of them back.
binarypie@reddit
this is not a place for your insecurity about someone else's role. we have zero context nor can we compre impact. besides titles don't matter!
faultydesign@reddit
Internships are experience
Parasitisch@reddit
My wife works at a company whose guidelines consider summer-long internships a year of experience for if/when students decide to come work there after school.
They also count part time joiners who are working throughout the school year, but with very limited hours, as a full year. Someone who works 10 hours a week for 10-12 months is getting that much more experience than someone working 40 hours for three months? They almost equal the same amount of hours over the year.
This seems like a non-issue unless there is some problem happening. Is he underperforming for his role? If not, why do you care?
PracticallyPerfcet@reddit
That’s not that bad. I once worked with a guy that went from working at a Best Buy to being Director of IT at a college in 5 years. Bro didn’t know shit about tech, but he learned corpo-speak and dressed the part.
Now you really want to talk unethical? Wait until you work for a boss that misappropriates funds or retaliates against employees for reporting sexual harassment.
dashingThroughSnow12@reddit
1) It is the interviewers’ job to look at the resume and do some counting.
2) YoE is not a useful metric by itself. Look at the comments on a normal post in this subreddit for evidence.
3) They’ve probably been counting internships since they graduated and either no one caught it or no one cared to.
4) I kinda agree with you about this being a problem. A staff engineer makes decisions that last for years. Say five year rolling cycles. To be a staff engineer you need to make decisions that you are around long enough to start seeing the long-term costs & yields of and see the same for decisions that other people made. Interns tend to get greenfield tasks.
Possibly, they could be a great staff engineer. Likely, they are probably missing the baseline experience (I’m not talking about years) that a staff engineer needs. Heck, they might be missing some of refinement of skills that a senior needs.
Practically, just smile. Treat them with the respect you’d treat any other senior engineer. Don’t belittle them or defame them just because of their years of experience. They got the job. Let them succeed or not based on their merits. Be friendly.
Stargazer__2893@reddit
I mean, one of the worst engineers I've worked with claimed they had 20 YoE when they were under 30 years old.
I wouldn't call it unethical so much as bullshit.
yad76@reddit
How do you know he decided to count internships? What kind of internships were they?
Are you sure he didn't finish his degree after he started working full time as an engineer? I did this so I don't display my education years because it would be confusing.
How was the question about "years of experience" asked? "How many years of full time experience do you have as an engineer?" is a different question than something like "How long have you been programming?"
Also, if your company is calling people "staff" just because they passed some arbitrary number of years (and 5-10 years at that!) then there is a deeper problem here than just this guy's history.
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
Ummm … let’s start with understanding the difference between ethics and morals.
Own-Chemist2228@reddit
Let me tell you about the senior architect consultant that my company hired. He was billing $250/hr. He had all the qualifications, including a PhD from Southern California University.
Yes, Southern California University, the prestigious research institute. Go Trojans!
Um ... wait a second ... but whey does everyone call it USC, as in University of Southern California .... that's a little weird....
Southern California University was an online degree mill. If you google it it you won't find it because the state shut it down.
When it was discovered that his PhD was fake, guess what happened? Nothing.
Because the hiring manager didn't want to admit that he hired a dud. They continued to pay him and let him make high level decisions for another six moths. The only reason he left is because the project was canceled.
Lindensan@reddit
It's very blurry what is actually internship and what is just a part time job as a junior dev. Most people work part-time as soon as they can unless they are super rich.
janyk@reddit
Then start counting internships instead of supporting this new trend of arbitrarily not counting internships and calling yourself the ethical one. Then there won't be an ethical problem!
macoafi@reddit
I’ve always counted the years I worked while in school. They weren’t just internships.
PressureAppropriate@reddit
Are you not aware that some people land a job while being self-taught and then decide to go deep and get a degree?
That's what I did....
Also, have you considered just minding your own business?
AHardCockToSuck@reddit
The point of an internship is literally to get experience
waloz1212@reddit
It's not your business. He did the interview and got the job, if the interview process is flawed, it is on HR and the company.
diablo1128@reddit
Can they do the job they were hired for?
hyrumwhite@reddit
I never graduated. Do I have zero years of experience?
Internships count, and I’d say they’re more valuable than any given year of academia. Guess how many linked lists I’ve made and pumping lemmas I’ve used in my career?
crankyguy13@reddit
I’ve been getting paid to write code that is used in the real world since at least 6 years before I graduated college. Why wouldn’t I include those 6 years in my experience? If I go back a couple years before that I was paid for a one-off program I wrote even earlier. So I could technically claim 40 years of experience at this point. I don’t understand how years of experience matters anyway - if you can write good code and design reliable systems, who cares if you have 5 years or 50 years?
kernel_task@reddit
He’s at staff level 5 years out of school. That’s really impressive and his YoE number is irrelevant IMO and I think it’s a little weird to care this much either way.
GlobalCurry@reddit
I've encountered people who consider hobbyist stuff they did as kids as years of experience lol
SolFlorus@reddit
“I’ve been a software engineer since I was 8 and built a MySpace theme.”
Those people annoy the hell out of me. If you weren’t getting paid, it doesn’t count.
nullbyte420@reddit
This is not comparable to internships...
koutsiou@reddit
The important question here is: can he cover the role 100%?
timelessblur@reddit
It is lies and I don’t count internships but I legitimately know people who have 9-10 YOE but they graduate 5 years ago.
Difference is they started working full time in this field and then decided to get their degree while working so it has a weird overlap. I worked with a guy who started with my employer 4 years before I graduated and he got his degree 1 year before me. He was going to school at night while working full time as a software engineer.
clove1912@reddit
Who cares stfu
FetaMight@reddit
UK. This is how the world works on general. People have different ideas of what is ethical and occasionally step on eachother, deliberately or not.
I'm not sure what you're looking for from a bunch of strangers online.
I can get outraged, but my pitchfork is in the shop so I won't be able to join any angry mobs.
nullbyte420@reddit
What's the point of building experience if it doesn't count before you graduate? Why shouldn't it count? If he hadn't graduated, would it then count more? Maybe you're just an ass.
SomeoneInQld@reddit
Sadly, It's very typical now.
That's why you need to ask questions.
Also there is good experience and sitting on your ass in an easy job experience.
allknowinguser@reddit
Well that’s really up to HR to decide. Doesn’t sound like they were really lying, if they’re up front about internships versus full time. Some companies don’t count internship experience and some do. Plus if they’ve been at the company long enough and haven’t been fired for performance then, that’s also not on you but the company.
MonochromeDinosaur@reddit
Bro, if you find that’s unethical I have very bad news for you.