As opposed to a statistic like lines of code written. As opposed to ‘experience’ in the prescriptive sense like ‘The developer experience here uses Docker and Webpack and therefore is modern and therefore is good’. As opposed to ‘experience’ like years-of-experience in a certain role/technology.

I’m not the author, but I found that to be a highly important distinction for them to call out. It is about the way that each individual developer feels during each individual day, in a way that is hard to capture with statistics and summaries and lists of technologies and descriptions of processes.

My guess is ‘presumed’

I hear you, but it still seems redundant to me. Take the next use of the phrase:

> The developer's team, role and responsibilities, and seniority all impact their lived experience.

Why not just "all impact their experience"?

It's just a more complicated way of saying "personal experience"

I think people mostly use it as a pretentious way to say “self reported experience” or “data from living people.” Things that are based on personal experience (anecdata) and perception rather than anything tangible. Which is important data to consider but often not very useful since perceptions are coloured by beliefs. Using case studies of personal experiences can also be biased towards more extreme experiences or perceptions that are outside the norm.

I have heard of someone describing their “lived experience” of discrimination. They perceived discrimination in many situations where they had no evidence that the other party wasn’t impartial. But often the implication is that “lived experience” represents some form of truth that cannot be questioned.

Second hand experience (vicarious)

In practice "lived" means "subjective" - those aspects of the experience that are only observable by the person having them.

Yes.

Lived experience is when you encounter something and you live through that experience.

Learned experience is when you read about an encounter someone else lived through and they explain condensed points of emphasis.

The social media plugin and reporting system for the SaaS I'm working on is an idiotic, over-engineered monstrosity. But, after trial and error, I've mastered it from a what-goes-where-standpoint.

If I were to document the entire thing from my vantage point, it'd take me a week, and even if I did it, it'd take another dev about a week just to wrap their head around it to implement a new feature AFTER reading what I wrote. Or, I could do it between standup and lunch provided I had no distractions.

It's a shibboleth.

Lived experience stands in contrast to observed experience.

I as an outsider may observe a developer experiencing friction in a customer meeting. Ask the developer, and they may reveal that they found the arguments during the meeting highly valuable and productive.

The important thing to take away is that when an outsider looks at a situation, they often see something very different to what the people in it did. That's the difference between lived ("insider") and observed ("outsider").