I don't think number of features is meaningful, except if it's 0. Some features take a day, some take 2 months - I'd be 40x better if I only did the small ones :-)

Truth is, it's hard to evaluate coders. You need to at least be a decent programmer yourself. But even then there are many types of programming, and it's hard to measure effectiveness in large projects in a 1h interview, and people get stressed in interviews...

I can't agree with both. But number of years matters more than number of features.

With more number of years, you may be building more features and being in the game, you have learnt much more than those who move on to something else.

Consider my case where I did not build much features but I kept ageing. I learnt a thing or two about people skills and have enough skills to get clients, manage their expectations and deliver a product with humility. And getting well paid for it.

Consider my friend's case where he did not build features and did not learn anything. He rot in Infosys for six years. And after Infosys fired him for poor performance, he did not get any job. He aged but now he is closer to God. He is spiritual and is happy with his family. He has enough money to take care of his family for the rest of his life. Experience to save money and manage money is also survival skills which comes with age.

Now, if your question is for a HR agent, the answer is different. It depends on the context. If you are building a commodity product, then you want to reduce cost and you want people with lesser experience and people who can just do their work.

Now, if your question is to the founder of a start-up who wants to build the next hot product, the answer is someone who has done similar work -- not a person who has more experience nor someone who has built a lot of product features. Since you are building something new, you will look for a person who has done something similar - either in that area, or someone who has participated in building something new.

Flipkart was built by Bansals because they worked in Amazon.

Tesla was built by Musk because he had experience of the unknown / uncertainty when he was working with Paypal.

So, what matters for a hot start-up is dealing with uncertainty and working on similar areas. And neither number of years of experience nor number of product features will help in this regard.

As gijo said, if you are estimating experience of a developer by years or by projects they worked on most of freelancer.com members are the tech leads of the industry. Are they effective yes but not base criteria to understand experience.

Those things would guide the questions I'd ask them, but neither one's a stand-alone metric - you can't compare two people using those numbers. Plus you are never really trying to get a sort of "universal score" for people, you're only ever trying to figure out "how suitable are they to work on the current team" which is a bit different.

I can't agree with both.

For 2 years I worked as a freelancer. I learned a lot like how to manage time, how to communicate with clients, keep deadlines etc.

Another 2 years, I have been building my own team, the experience I got is really different. I learned how to teach, team collaboration, management, project management, scheduling, etc

No. of years doesn't really matter!

I don't think that's a good metric at all.

• you can suck for n amount of time
• you can suck for n projects

and the other way around. To me those metrics are useless and most of the times beside the point. Most of the interviews need to be done on an eye to eye basis with someone of the team and than there should be, as you mentioned, a technical discussions and even there it's hard to know if the current level is the correct judgment level.

Hiring people is hard and complex because it's value based and different companies and people have different values. So you need to design your system for your team / company anyways.

Maybe there are good studies on this how to create certain metrics .... I have to look it up :)