“It has been said that a person may have ten years of experience, or one year of experience repeated ten times.” — Yukiso Yamamoto

🧠 Think Note — Years ≠ Experience

Yukiso Yamamoto’s line hits home: some have 10 years of growth; others have 1 year repeated 10 times. Tenure isn’t trajectory.

🕵️ How to spot real growth (beyond dates on a CV):

- Breadth → new domains, constraints, teams.

- Depth → post-mortems, design trade-offs, “what I’d do differently.”

- Impact → metrics moved, incidents reduced, costs cut, speed gained.

- Evolution → practices they stopped using and why.

Keep a learning log, write mini-retros, chase stretch goals, and quantify outcomes.

1️⃣ Keep a Learning Log

🔸Why: makes growth visible and interview-ready.

🔸Where: a LEARNING.md in your repo, Notion/Obsidian, or a weekly email to yourself.

🔸Cadence: 10–15 min every Friday.

2️⃣ Write Mini-Retros (Fast)

🔸When: after a feature/incident/PR or end of week. 10 minutes tops.

3️⃣ Pursue an adjacent-skill, business-linked challenge that’s timeboxed, reversible, and observable.

🔸How: ~20–30% unknowns; baseline→target metrics; flags/canary/rollback; weekly demos; sponsor review.

🔸Done when: Metric moved with evidence, no SLO regressions, rollback tested, docs/KT done (abort if criteria hit).

4️⃣ Quantify outcomes

🔸 Method: Baseline → Change → After → Attribution; track delivery, reliability, performance, quality, and cost.

🔸 Evidence: Show before/after deltas with % (e.g., p95 480→290ms −39%, MTTR 90→22m); keep a 1-slide Problem→Action→Metric→Outcome, graphs, PR/runbook/flag notes.

🔸 Sources: APM (Datadog/Prometheus/Grafana), Git/CI, cloud bills, product analytics.

☝️ How do you spot real growth vs. repetition? Share red flags or interview questions that reveal true learning.

hashtag#SoftwareEngineering hashtag#CareerGrowth hashtag#Hiring hashtag#TechLeadership hashtag#Developers hashtag#poll