HACKER Q&A
📣 jawns

If asked for years of experience, how do you include part-time work?


Suppose you have some number of years of full-time experience in software development, and some other number of years where you were writing code part-time. Maybe you had a job that involved some dev work but some unrelated work as well. Or maybe you had an unrelated day job but did freelance dev work as a side hustle.

If you had to quantify that into a single number that represented your years of dev experience (e.g. on a job application), how would you come up with that number?

  👤 hindsightbias Accepted Answer ✓
Years are calendar years, not calendar hours.
👤 readonthegoapp
people just want answers, so just give them answers.

so, i been in the industry prob almost 30 years now.

if someone asks me how many years of 'x' (html/js/java/sql/unix/etc.), i might say anywhere from 5 to 30, depending on what i'm feeling like.

if they ask about shell scripting, something i did about 1 hour per month, on average, for 7 of the last 30 years, the answer is 5 years.

just make stuff up.

i try to go with reasonable numbers, because they are really just a proxy for "How good at you at 'x' on a 1-10 scale?"

and you could go into some long, boring explanation about, "Well i used to know Big-O really well 10 years ago, but it's been a while and...."

people are sleeping already. just give them a number. they have to put a number on their sheet - give them a number.

imo. :)

👤 NiagaraThistle
years are years. If you've known how to do something, and been doing it in some small way over the past 10 years, it doesn't matter if some was part-time, some full-time, some on your own in the basement. You've been practicing/doing it for 10 years. Now whether you became proficient in it over that 10 years is another matter...