Roughly eight years ago I bought myself a welder.  I was restoring the 1950 Bantam Jeep Trailer I had purchased and it needed a new floor and some other things welded up.  The costs for hiring it out were roughly half of the cost of a small 110V MIG welder so I figured it was time to make the investment in a new tool and new skillset.

Since then the welder has proven quite handy - I was able install the new floor in the trailer, and have also been able to create a tandem bike for my kids:

And a piece of artwork for our mantle:

Over the years I’ve also used the welder to make repairs and add-ons on the 1964 CJ6 Jeep that I’m working on, as well as small repairs for friends, relatives and neighbors.

So - what I’m thinking now is that if this web development gig doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I’ll be able to go apply for any welding job because I have eight years of experience welding.

Wait - why are you rolling your eyes like that?  And what was that small huffing sound you just made?

Well, OK.  You’re right.  Picking up a small welder and dabbling in it periodically doesn’t really add up to 8 years of experience that an employer would be interested in, does it?  I have a friend who is a certified welding inspector - he owns a business that does metal fabrication so he employs professional welders and has to inspect their work.  He likes to wander around my projects and point out which welds would and wouldn’t be acceptable to him - and I usually feel good if I shoot 20%.

Yet - I see this pitching of hobby work and playing around as “experience” in the web design and development world and it seems like people fall for it in a way they wouldn’t with my welding experience.  A few weeks back I was contacted by a person who just took on a internship with a client that I had done a site for.  The project included a new custom design and deployment on a content management system so all content on the site could be updated or changed without them needing to know HTML.  It was the perfect fit for them as a business because they are small and not in a field of business where they’d naturally have people on staff with web skills. The site was immediately beneficial to them - with their previous site you couldn’t Google their name directly and get their site in the results, and the new site got them in #1 spot for their own name in short order.

However it was the classic case of having all the available tools at hand and never taking the time.  The site has sat, relatively unchanged, since we launched it roughly 4 years ago.  Then here comes the new college intern who assures me that he has been “designing websites for about 8 years now” so I wouldn’t “need to be concerned that he would end up damaging the site.”

Right.

I went to look at it yesterday and sure enough - the main navigation has been moved, the nice little main nav icons that tied into the company’s business area (and they paid for) are gone, and in the place of the main nav is now a “doesn’t quite fit in that space” blurb for “latest news”.  Latest news - for a company that had nothing new to say over 4 years time.  All the new content could have been integrated without requiring the design changes.

Specifics aside - what bothers me is my former client probably heard the same “8 years experience” line and, even though it’s coming from a college senior and therefore means that this persons “experience” started in roughly the 8th grade, gladly handed over their most prominent piece of business marketing to this person.

So business people - listen up:  Periodically noodling around with web technologies as a hobby doesn’t equal “experience”.  Sites built out of that context are rarely based on any real-world constraints of time, budget, or business requirements.  When someone uses the word “experience”, what they should be implying is “I spent a considerable portion of my day for that period of time working with this stuff” and (ideally) “people paid me for it”.

You wouldn’t look at my welding projects and hire me on to do structural, mission critical welding.  Don’t do the same with your website.