📅 Join me: Clean Architecture for Backend Developers on Wed 26th Aug, 5:00 - 6:30 PM (CEST)
👋 Hello, this is Valentina with the free edition of the Optivem Journal. I help Engineering Leaders & Senior Software Developers apply TDD in Legacy Code.
Someone can spend 20 years getting better at software engineering.
Or they can spend 20 years repeating the same mistakes.
The “I’ve Been Doing This for 20 Years” Developer
There’s a particular kind of senior engineer who is difficult to work with.
They’ve been doing this for a long time.
They’ve seen everything.
They have an answer for everything.
And every new problem gets solved with something they’ve already done before.
You suggest a different approach.
They tell you why it won’t work.
You show them an example.
They explain why that example is different.
You point out a problem with their approach.
They tell you they’ve been doing this for 20 years.
And that’s supposed to end the discussion.
Experience Doesn’t Fix Bad Habits
It makes them harder to see.
A developer who has spent 10 years writing huge classes doesn’t necessarily become better at design.
They might simply become extremely fast at writing huge classes.
A developer who has spent 10 years avoiding tests doesn’t become good at testing.
They become very experienced at working without tests.
And someone who has spent years solving every problem with another layer, abstraction, framework, or design pattern can become incredibly experienced at overengineering.
Experience makes you better at whatever you repeatedly practice.
Including the wrong things.
Stop Counting Years
Years of experience are a terrible measurement of engineering ability.
A developer with three years of experience who constantly learns, experiments, gets feedback, and improves their approach can be far more effective than someone with fifteen years who stopped learning five years ago.
I’ve seen developers with relatively little experience who can walk into an unfamiliar codebase and start asking the right questions.
And I’ve seen extremely experienced developers who can’t change their approach even when it’s clearly not working.
Good Engineers Say “I Was Wrong”
The best engineers can look at their own code and say:
“I wouldn’t write this that way today.”
Years of experience can tell you how long someone has been in the game.
It doesn’t tell you how well they’ve played it.
Getting better means being willing to rethink how you’ve been doing things.
Join the live session:
Clean Architecture for Backend Developers
🗓 Aug 26
⏰ 5:00–6:30 PM (CEST)
Years of experience don't automatically make you a better engineer.
As I like to say it, there is a difference between someone with 20 years of experience and someone with one year of experience repeated 20 times.