[sic1]

> The aha moment for me was when I worked with a 26 yo trombone major who took a 3 month coding bootcamp who was showing nearly the same level of programming proficiency as me. And I wasn't a schmuck programmer.

Programming proficiency and programming/development/software knowledge are two different things. He may have _proficiency_, but does he have real world experience of working in a dev team? Handling nasty bugs? Working on legacy code bases? And so on..

People may be able to get up to speed quickly with all the resources at their fingertips these days (which is great), but if you only had a team of those people... Well, I wouldn't bet a business on it.

Full disclosure, we just hired a 40+ dev and could not be happier with the experience he brings to the team. Yes, we could have saved $20K+ and got someone younger in their career, but he's already shown his value in getting up to speed quickly and tackling large tasks/issues right away.

There will always be shops on both sides of the hiring fence (I've seen both), I call them farm teams vs the big leagues.

[jmathai]

I'm really not trying to be dismissive here...but I think you're pointing out exceptions and not the rule. The vast majority of software jobs don't need 20 years of experience. 5-10 years is plenty.

> Programming proficiency and programming/development/software knowledge are two different things. He may have _proficiency_, but does he have real world experience of working in a dev team? Handling nasty bugs? Working on legacy code bases? And so on..

He had everything needed to do the job.

> I call them farm teams vs the big leagues.

This was at a startup in SF acquired by a giant software firm.