Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#31

Post by bradknowles »

hackits wrote: post #18
mdorazio wrote: post #10

You might be looking at this only from the perspective of a young person who wants to find a job. If you consider the perspective of an actual hiring manager, things start to make a lot more sense. Let's use a hypothetical example based on some plausible real-world stats... A hiring manager at a decently desirable company posts a job online. Within a week they are likely to get around 50 applicants, at which point th…

Also experience tell's you the person isn't going to do anything inappropriate in front of colleagues and do any sexual misconduct.

Not really. How many people are only being called out now for having done all sorts of inappropriate things, and who are at or near the top of their field?

You can be an 80 year old man who is doing totally inappropriate things by sexting pictures of their junk to underage kids.

Or haven’t you been watching the news lately?

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#32

Post by celdon25 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #12

To some degree yes, but mostly no. I have 25+ years experience, and I make as much as my coworkers who have ~5 years experience. There are engineers younger than me that make more than I do. I don't get a free pass or more money because I'm older with more experience. There's a great deal of salary compression once you hit about 10 years experience. Someone with 20 years of experience isn't twice as good as someone w…

You're assuming that salary is determined by how "good" somebody is at the job itself. Sorry to be the one to tell you that is but a small part of it. At the end of the day, the company really doesn't know how good you actually are. Your manager may have a decent understanding of the skill level of the members of their team. But your manager doesn't have much of a say over your salary.

It's 2017, and we are still using an archaic architecture for the worker-business relationship. As long as the workers continue to believe that they are getting a great deal, then this will continue.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#33

Post by celdon25 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #15
austincheney wrote: post #2

What would you recommend as an objective qualitative measure of competency? The rest of the world, in just about every profession, has certifications or licenses. Unfortunately, this makes software developers cry. It could be that there are many people working as developers who aren't qualified to be there.

Certifications and licenses certainly exist, but proof of their effectiveness often does not. You, after all, do need to hire the people who failed to find out if it works, which tends to be unpopular. If you can produce a demonstratably effective test for filtering out incompetent or low productivity employees, people will bury you in cash at you without hesitation.

Mark my words, we will see major improvements in this area within 5 years.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#34

Post by andy_ppp »

I always love to see jobs that list 5 years of React skills as a requirement ;-)

Seriously though, I think what’s important is to look at your weaknesses and keep improving and learning new technologies. X years of experience just shows that you have hopefully grown professionally and personally from where you are today. If you are sure you can do a job I as an employer wouldn’t mind seeing this sort of information in a cover letter hopefully with links to code examples on github.

Finally X years of experience is meant to show how to get the best out of working on a team!

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#35

Post by djellybeans »

fulafel wrote: post #24
mdorazio wrote: post #10

You might be looking at this only from the perspective of a young person who wants to find a job. If you consider the perspective of an actual hiring manager, things start to make a lot more sense. Let's use a hypothetical example based on some plausible real-world stats... A hiring manager at a decently desirable company posts a job online. Within a week they are likely to get around 50 applicants, at which point th…

> But we need something that can be evaluated quickly, and experience is an easy proxy since it at least indicates that a person has been around a thing for a while and wasn't so bad at it that they got fired for incompetence. This fits workplaces that make CRUD apps. But if you're ambitious you really don't want to filter out the un-cynical young people that might have lost patience with a poor employer in a short t…

I must be somewhere in between. Not really new (worked as a programmer at 5 different companies), but not quite ready to be a hiring manager. Though to be fair I have never managed people in my life.

From my experience having worked in mostly agencies doing the CRUD work you described, and other "consultant-like" work, not many skills seem easily transferable to large, well-known B2C corporations where the software they work on is their own (not the property of clients) and need to deal with massive datasets. My interviews and resumes get rejected from this gap in knowledge. I simply don't have much of that sort of experience. Yet time and again I am faced with high scrutiny because of how many years I've worked in my career.

It's about time I update my resume. Perhaps I need to create a much more functional resume, and less chronological based one. Emphasizing my best personal projects and most relevant skills while trimming away the older jobs, to make myself look more fresh.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#37

Post by GoToRO »

Because is easy and you don't need to be a very good recruiter to use it (its's how for cameras people use megapixels and not the actual quality of the picture).

Because, as a recruiter, you just need to fill the job; you have no incentive to do justice to any particular person.

Because recruting is just another job and you just printed the cv as the candidate entered the office and the first 3 questions will all have the answers in the cv, because you didn't read it.

Because beeing a good recruiter is hard and rare so you mostly encounter bad recruiters that use easy to understand signals, like years of experience.

Because with a little guidence anyone could do the job but the person with the guidence left the company.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#38

Post by Rubinsalamander »

As long as they can fill open jobs with somehow suitable canditates they have no real reason to change their established process. They dont need perfect but good enough. So even if they miss some good canditates it doesnt matter and they dont know which person they missed in hindsight.

If they have problems finding qualified workers they are much less strict with requierments and more creative

Another reason to prefer easily measured established values like experience is to justify yourself against higher ups if something goes wrong

Re: Ask HN: Why are we still using years of experience to measure work aptitude?

#40

Post by frobozz »

One reason is because they have survived.

A fresh graduate, or a one-year-in second jobber could be a genius with encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. They could also be utterly incapable of doing the job. Their Dunning-Kruger overconfidence is untempered by the experience of being overtaken by considerably more competent cow-orkers.

Someone who has been at it for 5 or more years, should have a reasonable grasp of whether or not they can do the job (though not necessarily the level at which they can do it).

Post reply on HN