How old is your liege?

I don’t know about you, but it seems wild to me when people with a couple of years of experience call themselves “Senor Developer”. Of course, individual geniuses can write ideal programs while still in school, but then they and geniuses are only a few out of millions.

However, recently these same geniuses have become a bit much. Not just a lot, but enough to influence the market. It is easy to find job seniors / architects / timlids with experience from the year.
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So what happens? In fact, we have a harvest of geniuses or just a fashionable news topic? Has anything changed in recent years? I decided to find out. Under the cat research methodology, some graphs and sudden results.

Methodology

Obviously, it’s not worth considering a person’s statement about himself as a metric. But here it is worth listening to the opinion of the industry. I decided to get a sample of the required experience for vacancies in recent years and use the experience in years required by applicants as an estimate of the “value” of senior status.

For data I wrote a parser hh.ru. Unfortunately, all thirty million of their archival vacancies are either expensive or long to parse. Since the study is of an estimated nature, I found it acceptable to select a significant amount of data and assume that there are no distribution anomalies.

It launched 30 instances of the parser in increments of a million id by vacancies. the first instance collected vacancies from 1 (actually from 3, there are no vacancies with id 1 and 2) to 1,000,000, the second from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000, and so on. In the unlikely event that the parsing goes fast, almost all the vacancies should have been received. Unfortunately, parsing has slowed down quite noticeably, approaching 1,000,000 records in the database. I had to stop it with 1194221 vacancies. Taking this opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude to the company HeadHunter, which has not blocked me for these two days.

When calculating, the interval of experience was estimated as the arithmetic average of the boundaries, for example, 1-3 was considered as 2. The combined job vacancy was considered to the maximum, for example, middle / senior -> senior. As a result, 12,120 identified vacancies were received. The graph below shows that the step in a million was relatively successful.

results

In assessing, the average amount of experience that employers required was simply calculated:

avg = (xp1 + xp2 + xp3 + ... + xpn) / n

Only vacancies were considered, the headlines of which directly indicated the word grade.



As can be seen from the graph below, employers do not lower the requirements at all; on the contrary, they increase! And increase steadily and not the first year.

Small afterword

My opinion, especially valuable for everyone, is as follows: everything is logical. Complicated application structure, you need to know and be able to more. Naturally, training time is also increasing. It would be strange if the time of developer training decreased.

People who call themselves seigneurs, most likely, are not mistaken and not mistaken. The fact is that a year is enough to perfectly master a topic, such as a language or database. But! To be a truly experienced developer in your field, you need to know a bunch of related information.

Speaking for my beloved PHP, I can say with all the responsibility: to become a guru is real in a year, maybe even faster. But besides the language itself and the general theory there are many other no less, and perhaps more important things. Framework, SQL, NOSQL, MQ, administration ... Where to stay - I do not know.

There is no clear division into grades in the similarity of professional categories. What senor should be able to do and how he should differ from junior everyone decides for himself. As one person said the other day in a discussion of this topic

Each office has its own requirements for seniors. Moreover, each person has his own vision of the one who can be a senior. So no wonder. In one office, you can not even pass the middle, and in the other you are a senior senior with architectural manners. Everything depends on the master-master.

Every year there are more and more developers, including highly specialized ones. They probably constitute the majority of the "two-year" seniors.

In general, how you are called in the company is not important. Today, senor, tomorrow there is no nonsense, it’s something everyday. The main thing is not to attach great importance to lychkam and not to consider them as an indicator of something. Especially as a reason to cease to reach for knowledge.

I got a lot of fun writing this article. Bounding data and picking them is one of my favorite activities. If suddenly someone needs a dump to learn, write in a personal or comments. I had thoughts to put the parser code, but having looked at it with a fresh eye, I changed my mind. Such things are not taken to show in a decent society.