How old is your lord?

I don’t know about you, but it seems wild to me when people with a couple of years of experience call themselves “senior developer”. Of course, individual geniuses can write ideal programs back in school, but for that they are geniuses - a few out of millions.

However, recently these same geniuses have become a bit too much. Not just a lot, but enough to influence the market. It is easy to find vacancies of seniors / architects / team leaders with experience of a year.

So what is going on? In fact, we have a crop of geniuses or just a trendy news topic? Has anything changed in recent years? I decided to find out. Under the cut, research methodology, few graphs and sudden results.

Methodology

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

To get the data, I wrote the hh.ru parser. Unfortunately, hiring all thirty million of their archived jobs is either expensive or long. Since the study is evaluative in nature, I found it permissible to select a significant amount of data and assume that there are no distribution anomalies.

30 parser instances were launched with a step of one million id for 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 parsing goes fast, almost all jobs should have been received. Unfortunately, parsing slowed quite noticeably, approaching 1,000,000 records in the database. I had to stop him having 1194221 vacancies. Taking this opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude to HeadHunter which did not block me for these two days.

When calculating the experience interval was estimated as the arithmetic average of the boundaries, for example 1-3 was considered as 2. The grade of the combined vacancy was considered to the maximum, for example middle / senior -> senior. As a result, 12120 identified vacancies were received. The graph below shows that the step in a million came out relatively successful.

results

The assessment simply calculated the average amount of experience that employers required:

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

Only vacancies were considered, in the headings of which the word grade was directly indicated.



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

Short afterword

My opinion, which is especially valuable for everyone, is this: everything is logical. The structure of applications is getting complicated, you need to know and be able to do more. Naturally, the time for training also increases. It would be strange if the preparation time for the developer was reduced.

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

Speaking for my favorite PHP, I can say with all responsibility: to become a guru really 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 likeness of professional categories. What should be able to seigneur and how it should be different from a 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 who can be a senior. So there is nothing surprising. You can’t even go to one office in the middle, and you are a fine senior with the manners of the architect in another. Everything depends on the master-master.

Every year, more and more developers, including highly specialized ones. They probably make up the bulk of the "two-year-old" seniors.

In general, what they call you in the company is not important. Today senor, tomorrow no, nothing, a matter of everyday life. The main thing is not to attach great importance to the tags and not to consider them as an indicator of something. Especially as a reason to stop reaching for knowledge.

I got a lot of pleasure from writing the article. Pulling and picking data is one of my favorite activities. If suddenly someone needs a dump to study, write in a personal or comments. I had thoughts to lay out the parser code, but I looked at it with a fresh look and changed my mind. Such things are not customary to show in a decent society.