How important is it for software engineers to have professional experience?

[evan@cosocial.ca]

How important is it for software engineers to have professional experience?

#EvanPoll #poll

[floppy@mastodon.me.uk]

@evan you can certainly be a "programmer", "developer", "coder" or whatever, but I'm not sure you can really claim "software engineer" without the professional experience. Or maybe that's just me being a gatekeeper. 🤷‍♂️

[the_moep@mastodon.de]

@evan Depends on the definition of "professional experience" but definitely at least "somewhat" for me.

[emc2@indieweb.social]

@Floppy @evan

Software engineering, as distinct from programming, is a body of knowledge that has far more to do with human behavior and organization. It's about effectively maintaining large bodies of code across long periods of time, with large teams of diverse skill levels. It's also about being able to predict the path of least eventual pain.

This can *only* be learned from front-line experience, because the primary mechanism is learning from mistakes. It cannot be taught in a classroom.

[floppy@mastodon.me.uk]

@emc2 @evan well put

[anibyl@social.coop]

@evan I don't think it's different from other fields.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@the_moep could you expand on how it would change depending on different definitions?

[the_moep@mastodon.de]

@evan Well the main difference in definition would be that people only consider paid contract/employed experience as "professional" vs. unpaid hobby work.

And especially in the open source community you have a lot of projects that are done by unpaid volunteers, some potentially still in training or simply self-trought. And those definitely reach the level of "traditional" paid work so limiting "professional experience" in a way which excludes this work (which some still do) would mean that it's only "somewhat important" for software engineers to have paid experience.

But nonethelss the paid aspects, imo. it's still important to have experience in complex software projects beyond simply coding, but also project management and support skills but I wouldn't say that these can only be gained in what is commonly refered to as a "professional context".