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

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

#1

Post by djellybeans »

There are things about years of experience that may guess something about a worker's aptitude with certain skill sets, but it's just that, a guess, not a sure-fire guarantee.

Not every programmer with some years of experience is better than a recent grad at doing certain things. A new grad from a top school can fire on all cylinders with some training. Having more years of experience does not confirm that a person requires less or no training, however.

Yet we state in job requirements "5 years experience with ____" with a sweeping generalization for everyone that has worked with ____ 5 years. People are held to different standards based on number of years of work rather than their accomplishments. That's some flawed reasoning. There is no standard consensus to measure some aptitude for any given length of experience. Experience is only a measure of time quantity. But quality and accomplishments are what matter.

So why are many companies grouping applicants by years of experience, and not by quality?

The only forward answer that I have gotten was "because it's easy, and a measure (but not THE measure)". I don't find this answer satisfactory. It almost defends a lack of investing more time or effort to find better ways to filter applicants for desired aptitude.

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

#2

Post by austincheney »

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.

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

#4

Post by bigiain »

Because tech recruiting is fundamentally broken. And pretty much every smart geek who thinks "How hard can it be?"and decides to disrupt it, ends up walking away battered and bruised (usually muttering under their breath "People man! You wouldn't _believe_ what people do sometimes!")

Also, because the people paying for and the people doing the recruiting have very different incentives, motives, and KPIs - from the people getting recruited... It doesn't make sense to _you_, because the question you think they're answering is not "How do we get the largest number of vaguely plausible candidates into the sausage-machine with the least amount of effort - while minimising the numb er of obvious no-hires down below some acceptable level - so that one one of them flukes the 'cultural fit' lottery we get 25% of their first year's salary?"

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

#5

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

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.

I'd recommend blind auditions, just like the best professional orchestras use to hire "the best players". But they need to be blind from absolute beginning to sign the job offer. This culture fit nonse is nonsensical. If culture means that much in an almost entirely at-will environment- it is straight up discrimination. Have a probation period for the love of Pete! -just like the orchestras do. Why is this so hard for a bunch of really smart so-called scientists?

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

#7

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

If there were a better way, we would be doing it. Recruiting is half science, half art. There is no formulaic way to guarantee you'll find the perfect hire. There likely never will be. People are fickle -- you could find the perfect person for a position who could have the ulterior motive of "resting and vesting", and not being the leader in your organization that you'd hope they would have been.

So we take proxies -- like degrees from renown (or at least accredited) institutions, prior employer prestige, and years of experience as signals for what may be. But ultimately, we can never know.

Even with a whiteboard coding exercise, the subject could get lucky and know the question. Or get nervous and fail miserably, but would have succeeded on the job.

There is no good answer for how to reliably choose talent. If there was a prescribed way, we'd do it. The best that we've come across in our industry is to say, "well, the candidate could implement algorithm on the whiteboard, so maybe they know a thing or two".

Also, you might be over estimating the amount of time/effort we should put into hiring. Most employees are at will, so we can quickly get rid of them if they aren't a fit. In a world where employment trends further and further towards being ephemeral, why should we invest any more than we do?

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

#8

Post by snow_mac »

Training and experience are different qualifiers. Often times employers want more then you can do "x" in "y" framework. Sure out of some kind of training program you can do things quickly, "correctly" if there is such a thing. And most importantly on time. But it often time is more than just the skills to do the job, it's the skills to think, to conduct yourself in a professional manner and also the relevant experience doing many different things.

If the company just wants you to lay down lines of code the way you lay down bricks, sure I could see any tech school training as being sufficient. But years of experience are an indicator of a number of different factors:

1. You were competent enough to hold a job(s) doing x for y years

2. You get along with others if you don't how could you possibly accrue 5 years of experience working

3. You've seen different approaches to doing things, which can give you insight into how to do things that make sense for this application

4. You have awareness of performance, maintainability, testing etc... that affect a long-term success of a project.

I think it can be helpful, recent grads are just that, recent grads. You have a lot to learn about working for a company, contributing code in a long-running project and other things that your college or tech school training cannot provide.

Best case the code you write for this company will be in production and running for many years to come. That's what the company is hoping for. Not just a short-term implementation of some best practices to satisfy short-term goals.

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

#9

Post by blikdak »

When I first started developing software and systems I thought it was about the code. Now after many years experience I know the less code I write the better. This is not something they teach or you want to learn when you’re just getting into coding.

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

#10

Post by mdorazio »

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 they basically stop looking at new ones. Probably 30% of those can be eliminated immediately for not having any relevant experience or coursework whatsoever, having glaring mistakes in their resume, etc. Now the hiring manager still has 35 applicants to evaluate. How do you propose that they narrow the pool in a way that doesn't take weeks of labor? Remember that any multi-round interview, skills test, whiteboarding session, etc. is going to take significant time from the team as well for every single candidate.

This is now an optimization problem. The hiring manager and team have X hours they can allocate to reviewing resumes and interviewing, but X is not nearly enough to properly evaluate the skill level of every single applicant in the pool. We need shortcuts to narrow it to a reasonable level, so what options do we have? Experience is one, so is pedigree (prestige of school, certifications, etc.), maybe we could also look at GitHub commits or spend a maximum of 5 minutes per candidate looking at referenced projects/websites. 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. And in many cases that's better to look at than having no indicator at all (i.e., 0 years experience).

It's also worth noting that experience implies more than just technical competence. There is value in having worked on a team in a real-world work setting using skill X that goes beyond how well you can solve technical problems. Experience means you've seen things go right, and also seen them go wrong, you've worked with various kinds of people and personalities while doing X and have the benefit of knowing what to do when you encounter a situation that has come up before.

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