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

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

#41

Post by Symphlion »

bradknowles wrote: post #29
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…

With respect, I’ve got nearly 30 years of experience in the field, and I have the same questions —- why do people equate years of experience with competence? I’ve met so many people who are incompetent and yet have many years of experience, and I’ve met a number of people who are very competent but do not actually have that many years of experience.

I agree to some extent, years of experience doesn't necessarily equate to competence, however, it does help in determining whether or not that person is at least capable of dealing with problems so common in our development world.

It's not _just_ about the technical skill, our jobs require us to communicate, think, analyze problems/challenges, troubleshoot, fix bugs, oh and also, on occasion, write code :P

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

#42

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

eric-hu wrote: post #14
brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Having worked with people who were eventually fired, I believe there's ample material behind "culture fit". It's stressful working with someone who rubs others the wrong way. Maybe they're borderline sexist, but not enough where you can pin anything on them. Some people in the office will avoid that team or part of the office. Maybe they're borderline reverse-sexist, where you disagreeing with them means you're obvio…

Those rare situations stink. I agree. But from my own experience with blind auditions and from the actual data on how they allow, for example, the percentage of women in symphony orchestras to jump from around 5% to more than 50% in the case of the New York Phil in particular and above at least 35% across the whole industry of orchestral music, I'd say they were resoundingly effective in diversifying professional music. Yes, there are a couple of instances I know of where musicians didn't make it past the probation period. But these instances are extremely rare. The audition to get a job is so difficult, it tends to weed out the un-humble and those whose focus is not mainly the production of great music. They know how to select for top skill and the auditions test for it. Part of that skill is the ability to be flexible, to identify vibe and style of your team, to blend when necessary and to take risks when called upon and above all to be a great collaborator with others of extremely high skill. The process tends to filter out the on-the-job jerks. Not every time, but mostly. And that is what probation review is for. It is for every player and is decided by committee. I think for the rare mistake, such diversity advocacy is well worth the occasional error as opposed to the current system which yields very poor diversity numbers in tech as we are all aware.

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

#44

Post by InternetOfStuff »

> Yet we state in job requirements "5 years experience with ____" with a sweeping generalization for everyone that has worked with ____ 5 years.

I'd be happy to hire somebody with five years of experience. However I might get somebody with ten times six months of experience instead. Not the same thing.

My point is: somebody who has worked on a thing so big that it took five years, and watched its growing pains and observed it take detours and outright wrong paths has learned a great deal, and I'd be eager to have them on my team.

Somebody who spent the last five years banging out lots of cookie-cutter two-month projects doesn't bring that experience at all.

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

This is a reasonable question. If somebody has long experience, this is a quality, in my experience. But, as I explained above, plain counting years gives no valuable information.

> 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.

Neither do I.

As an aside (which some might object to), I feel myself growing sympathetic to reverse-ageism: I'd prefer to only have people older than 30 years on my team. To put it most bluntly: somebody that old will very likely have been egregiously wrong before, will have failed spectacularly before. It has been my experience that this makes people better engineers, and better teammates.

People who haven't met with failure yet make me suspicious.

Now get off my lawn.

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

#45

Post by PurpleRamen »

While the experienced worker might be useless for a company, with the unexperienced worker we know that he will be useless. The experience companys need is the kind of knowledge you can't learn at school, not even from hobby-projects. You need to learn it under the specific pressure of a workplace inside the general conditions of a company. Because the most important part for a company is not how good the worker is, but how much negative impact the worker has on the company. The unexperienced worker is someone who will drain worktime of other, for training and because of failures that happen. The experienced worker will drain much less, maybe even none, so he is less damaging for a company. And how smart or skilled someone might be, gaining this experience is only possible through time. So someone with less or no experience is also less valuable for a company, and more damaging.

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

#46

Post by muzani »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #45

While the experienced worker might be useless for a company, with the unexperienced worker we know that he will be useless. The experience companys need is the kind of knowledge you can't learn at school, not even from hobby-projects. You need to learn it under the specific pressure of a workplace inside the general conditions of a company. Because the most important part for a company is not how good the worker is,…

The bar for 'experienced' variees a lot though. Someone with 0 months of experience is useless. But I've seen plenty of people with 3 months experience do better than people with 3 years experience. Some also have dealt with logic or projects at a much younger age or in college (like college is supposed to do)

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

#47

Post by thesmallestcat »

djellybeans wrote: post #35
fulafel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> My interviews and resumes get rejected from this gap in knowledge.

> Perhaps I need to create a much more functional resume, and less chronological based one.

No, do something about that skills gap.

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

#48

Post by PurpleRamen »

muzani wrote: post #46
PurpleRamen wrote: post #45

While the experienced worker might be useless for a company, with the unexperienced worker we know that he will be useless. The experience companys need is the kind of knowledge you can't learn at school, not even from hobby-projects. You need to learn it under the specific pressure of a workplace inside the general conditions of a company. Because the most important part for a company is not how good the worker is,…

The bar for 'experienced' variees a lot though. Someone with 0 months of experience is useless. But I've seen plenty of people with 3 months experience do better than people with 3 years experience. Some also have dealt with logic or projects at a much younger age or in college (like college is supposed to do)

Yes, there is no way to measure personality and general experience. So it's of course not a perfect solution. But it's sane defensive solution. It filters out the exceptions in both directions and gives a good baseline of ability you can except from the people. If this doesn't work, you can also go lower. It should be also noted that "x years epxerience" is not always a hard rule, but just a guidance. It should specifically drive those away who are lacking the confidence and knowledge about the job. Someone with just 2-3 years could be equal good for a job.

> Some also have dealt with logic or projects at a much younger age or in college (like college is supposed to do)

As said, the experience learned under the pressure of a workplace is quite different from the experience learned at a lazy school- or hobby-project. School and hobby only teaches the basics and is more acceptable to failures. But companys are seeking the masters, for which experience is neccessary. Of course there are always exceptions, but those exceptions usually can present some kind of experience, so they kind of automatically fall out of the scope of the question. Someone working x years activly on a bigger project should put it into his vita, so that he can sell this experience.

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

#49

Post by warrenm »

bradknowles wrote: post #29
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…

With respect, I’ve got nearly 30 years of experience in the field, and I have the same questions —- why do people equate years of experience with competence? I’ve met so many people who are incompetent and yet have many years of experience, and I’ve met a number of people who are very competent but do not actually have that many years of experience.

You can have 1 year of experience 30 times

Or you could have 30 years of experience

Both look like "30 years" - but it, generally, comes out in screening and interviewing processes who actually has the "30 years"

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

#50

Post by warrenm »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #7

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 -…

>Most employees are at will, so we can quickly get rid of them if they aren't a fit.

While this is technically true, it's ridiculous to think most employers think this way. Onboarding costs (from placing ads to interviewing to extending offers to actually hiring to getting equipment issued to getting people signed up for all the crap they need to get signed up for to training etc) is MASSIVELY expensive.

A day of interviewing costs not only the flight & hotel for the candidate (presuming they're from out of town), but also the lost work time for everyone involved as interviewers.

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