Re:What Happens to Older Developers?
by chipotle_coyote on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @11:18AM
(#7429189)
Of course, this is probably a major contributing factor to companies having trouble hiring programmers. Finding someone with the exact experience of your current problem is actually pretty difficult.
Its kind of stupid really.
In my past maintenance programming jobs, I would say it took 6 months to get up to speed. I would put less than two months of that down to new languages. Most of it is getting to know the code that is already written (and usually poorly documented) and some of it is gaining domain knowledge.
what a lot of employers don't want to do is to pay somebody to learn on the job. It sucks, because such an employer is a good one, but to people who don't care, and is in need of a job getting done, they just see it as extra cost and lost productivity. Why hire somebody smart who can learn fast (and thus can adapt to new roles as they come), when you can pay someone with the _exact_ experience at solving your current problem!