Jeff Atwood's most recent blog post is titled The Years of Experience Myth, and argues that too many companies place too much emphasis on how many years of experience a developer has in a certain technology. Jeff writes:
It's been shown time and time again that there is no correlation between years of experience and skill in programming. After about six to twelve months working in any particular technology stack, you either get it or you don't.
I agree that experience and skill in programming may not be directly correlated, and I concur that a skilled and motivated developer can pick up and be more proficient in a new technology in six months to a year than an unskilled, unmotivated developer who has spent years working with that same technology. But to say that years of experience doesn't matter one iota is lunacy.
The more experience you have with a technology or framework, the more intimate you become with its inner workings. You are privy to its warts - those underdocumented bugs that maybe only 1,000 people in the world have ever encountered and taken the time to understand its origin. You know little tricks and tips that you can only pick up from trial and error, from having spent an entire afternoon stumped on one bug that you finally worked around after trying so many different things. You get a sixth sense when it comes to troubleshooting problems because you've likely run into the same problem before. These are the benefits of experience.
I've been developing web applications with Microsoft technology since 1998, and I can say without doubt that I am a better ASP.NET developer today than I have ever been. My brain is not as sharp as it was in university, my computer science background not as keen as it was during grad school, my time not as disposable and my energy levels not as high as when I was younger, but I know ASP.NET better today than I did last year; last year I knew it better than the year before that, and so on.
Experience isn't everthing, but to discount it, to say that what one person has learned in 10 years can be mastered by another in six months to a year, is preposterous.