As opposed to a statistic like lines of code written. As opposed to ‘experience’ in the prescriptive sense like ‘The developer experience here uses Docker and Webpack and therefore is modern and therefore is good’. As opposed to ‘experience’ like years-of-experience in a certain role/technology.
I’m not the author, but I found that to be a highly important distinction for them to call out. It is about the way that each individual developer feels during each individual day, in a way that is hard to capture with statistics and summaries and lists of technologies and descriptions of processes.
I think people mostly use it as a pretentious way to say “self reported experience” or “data from living people.” Things that are based on personal experience (anecdata) and perception rather than anything tangible. Which is important data to consider but often not very useful since perceptions are coloured by beliefs. Using case studies of personal experiences can also be biased towards more extreme experiences or perceptions that are outside the norm.
I have heard of someone describing their “lived experience” of discrimination. They perceived discrimination in many situations where they had no evidence that the other party wasn’t impartial. But often the implication is that “lived experience” represents some form of truth that cannot be questioned.
Lived experience is when you encounter something and you live through that experience.
Learned experience is when you read about an encounter someone else lived through and they explain condensed points of emphasis.
The social media plugin and reporting system for the SaaS I'm working on is an idiotic, over-engineered monstrosity. But, after trial and error, I've mastered it from a what-goes-where-standpoint.
If I were to document the entire thing from my vantage point, it'd take me a week, and even if I did it, it'd take another dev about a week just to wrap their head around it to implement a new feature AFTER reading what I wrote. Or, I could do it between standup and lunch provided I had no distractions.
Lived experience stands in contrast to observational experience.
I as an outsider may observe friction in a developer--customer meeting. Ask the developer, and they may reveal that they found the arguments during the meeting highly valuable and productive. A lot of case studies and experiments in productivity improvement are observational. You do something and then you look at the results, rather than how the lives of the people involved changed.
When an outsider looks at a situation, they often see something very different to what the people in it did. That's the difference between lived ("insider") and observed ("outsider").
(Of course, strictly speaking, you don't get lived experience from interviewing people. People being interviewed tell you, to some extent, what they think you want to hear at that time. To really get closer to lived experience the researcher has to embed with the group being studied and work with them for some time.)
I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?