My guess is that there’s some sampling bias for the student population - if you’re plugged in enough to be doing this survey you’ve probably been hacking for a while.

Fwiw, I started getting paid for slinging code at 16, maintained the website for a university group in college, while still doing other work in the summers. I probably would have answered with “6 years of experience” if asked when I graduated.

Is that truly “professional experience”? In retrospect probably not, but 22yo me would have been too stubborn to answer otherwise.

Do you take hours ratio into the account?

e.g if you've been working 4h a week,

then it'd be weird to say after year that you have 1 year of commercial experience, when your colleagues spent 40 hours / week and have "only" 1 year too

I believe that pay is not necessary, but working for somebody else or in team (e.g OSS) is necessary.

So yea, I wouldn't say that hacking something even cool, but alone is commercial xp.

>Students claim to have 4.86 years (on average) of professional experience. O_o

You've heard of "5 years of experience" entry level jobs, now meet the "5 years of experience" students

The eight Canadian students claim to have an income of (avg) $116,850.5. I think it's time for me to move to Canada.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#salary-canada

I'm in Canada and these students allegedly make more money than I do with ~12 years of experience.

it gets better -- twenty years experience and you will make much less again

There are probably crypto-fintech-medtech jobs out there that pay 500k but we'd never get to the salary part of the conversation because the whole idea feels shady. Security might also pay well but there are too many personalities involved in the domain for me to find out.

Those are probably 16-month (effectively fulltime) coop students working at big tech/finance. By senior year some of my classmates were making 10-12k/month.

That's not at all surprising.

It's their intern salary projected on a yearly basis so ~ $9737/month.

Just a note, the comment is quoting from this:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-yea...

BTW many people go (back) to school after obtaining some professional experience. Not sure about the context of this part of the poll though.

The 4.86 years of experience is the mean of the 677 respondents who indicated student.

Going back to school after a few years is one thing... (and I lack the median, but I'm going to guess that it isn't too far from the mean) but having most students go back to school after 4 years of professional experience seems a bit odd.

I really suspect that they're either counting their 2 months of summer internship as a year several times over, misreading the professional part of it and including hobby, or misreading the professional and considering that they're a senior with 3 years of academic experience which translates 1:1 with professional, so they'll put that down.

The issue is that type of "something is fishy here" without further drilling into it makes me more skeptical of other data outliers and suspect more reporting and analysis issues than a (self reported) poll can be trusted.