I've interviewed people like this though not as extreme. Basically person gets a job. They learn the job in about 3-6 months and now repeat the same job for years without ever learning anything else. So on paper it shows 5-10 years experience, but in reality they still have about 3-6 months experience.

Part of the blame lies on the company for not giving the employee a growth path, but the largest part lies on the employee for not continuing to grow on their own. Software as a profession is one where you have to constantly be learning. People need to know going in that it is ultimately their responsibility to keep their skills growing and up to date.

> They learn the job in about 3-6 months and now repeat the same job for years without ever learning anything else. So on paper it shows 5-10 years experience, but in reality they still have about 3-6 months experience.

This is the most spot on thing I have read regarding this issue and is why interviewing is so challenging when it comes to developers. This is also why the interview process for developers is so grueling and long. You would be amazed how difficult it is to figure out how much ACTUAL learning experience a person has vs. someone that has done the same thing for 10 years.

I also feel this is why 20-somethings are popular, at least you know for certain how much experience one could possibly have.

Except for all the 20-somethings who started programming when they were 14.

It's been a big problem when I've been recruiting for developers. 10 years experience or 10 of the same year, normally it's the latter.

Personally if I feel I'm no longer learning then I raise it with my manager. If after a few months nothing has changed then I start interviewing.

I thought it was nearly impossible to do software development and not learn continuously? Can't imagine what a dev workday looks like when you aren't learning. You rarely ever do the same thing twice, and even if you do you learn from past mistakes and become more efficient.

So a dev is hired out of school to build CRUD forms in (VB6|GWT|Something similar). Most likely they master the technology in a few months and now just take new/change requirements and never deal with much beyond the original tech. In a big company where changes can take forever, the dev spends a lot of time waiting on new requirements, going to meetings and acceptance. Before you know it, a lot of time has passed and the dev is still just building CRUD forms in whatever technology that happened to be put on when they were hired.

> Software as a profession is one where you have to constantly be learning.

This is one thing that software shares with engineering disciplines

Having experience /is/ attractive. Not having it, though, is opposite of attractive, especially at 40 and without a degree.

Reading the article, I don't think "Now, life at a traditional office was not that bad: barely any work to be done, it mostly involved sitting at a desk and writing some emails all day. " means he had a developer job.

That might be the case. That's pretty much a definition of software development: 1) there is always a lot to do, in any code base 2) doing that for years, even if it's just improving the same code base, will give new challenges and experience.

If you don't have work to do and you aren't learning and progressing then you aren't doing software development, at least not properly.