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Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

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Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#111

Post by ransom1538 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person. Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with si…

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ability to say "no". This could be toxic. Fresh grads just take orders and start doing what the culture wants. Sure, there is a few spots for extremely specific niches - eg. you wrote podman, and they need to convert to podman yesterday. The only real hope, if you aren't a fresh faced grad is to get acquired - for some reason you get a pass from all interview hazing and drama [tons of friends in this group]. FAANGSs will also take in anyone from another FAANG at any stage in the career (nothing gives them sweeter pleasure than harming another FAANG).

Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#112

Post by borroka »

An anchoring effect is at play. Professionals, and people more in general, are defined by what they have done so far, especially after becoming full-fledged adults. The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today.

Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we see the paths of others.

Interestingly, baseball is the only sport in which the ordinary athlete, not the exception represented by the 20-year-old Dominican superstar, has to go from the minors to MLB. In all other sports, there is no adult developmental league to speak of. Sure, players transition from lower to higher level teams all the time, but those teams, apart from the usual exceptions, fly around in the same rarefied atmosphere of excellence.

For those who haven't done anything yet there is a "maybe, who knows" penciled next to the box, but for those who have done poorly there is a big "on to the next" written next to it.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#113

Post by greatpostman »

bboylen wrote: post #66
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not speaking to whether one with "the wrong experience" can or cannot pass FAANG-level interviews, I'm just commenting on the recruiter outreach from FAANG or startups (particularly AMZ) don't necessarily know or care about your skill, they only care about the buzzwords listed on your social profile(s) and maintaining a "hot" pipeline; aka getting bodies through the pipeline and hoping not to piss off engineering…

I don't disagree, it just seems to me the main barrier of entry is getting the interview in the first place since interviews focus on the technical component, not your resume. So if getting an interview is easy, then it follows that worrying about getting "the wrong experience" is not worthwhile. I'm mostly responding to the article's claims - not saying you made these claims.

Getting the interview at FAANG is easy, not at trendy startups

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#114

Post by rajin444 »

xivzgrev wrote: post #106

Imagine you are building a weight lifting team. You want strong people who are willing to work hard. Someone from the US Olympic marathon team applies! Wow! This guy is really good athlete. But..clearly his experience is with long distance running, not short intense bursts. He likely won’t be a good fit. Same thing with companies, just more nuanced.

It’s fairly well known among elite lifters that if elite athletes (NFL, etc) ever changed to lifting they’d likely dominate the sport.

What matters is the money. Same goes for programming.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#115

Post by projectazorian »

ransom1538 wrote: post #111
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person. Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with si…

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ab…

> Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that

No, that’s not what that means.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#116

Post by ransom1538 »

projectazorian wrote: post #115
ransom1538 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ab…

> Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that No, that’s not what that means.

True! It doesn't "mean" that. But you get the picture.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#117

Post by fnbr »

honkdaddy wrote: post #45
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person. Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with si…

Well said as usual, PragP. My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, w…

What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#119

Post by quickthrower2 »

ChrisPebble wrote: post #44
nnoitra wrote: post #37

Yes, it's called ageism. Young and fresh is perceived as better than experienced because some bozo will make the argument that they've been doing software engineering "wrong".

This is definitely true sometimes, but the “wrong” kind of experience can definitely hamper people. I have a highly skilled senior developer with a desktop app development background who joined our web team, he’s excellent at many tasks but keeps getting tripped up when dealing with state. He logically knows how it works, but his muscle memory when programming is so used to being able to rely on state that it’s hard…

State management is also a thorn for desktop apps that need to talk to a server. Or even desktop apps that need to use a local data store, and whose UI has effects not stored when saving. E.g. this is why the MVVM pattern exists in WPF (the last desktop platform I worked on). And things like Reactive Extensions.

JS/React in some sense is just using a high level desktop development language, fetch is rpc, and the server is ... the server.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#120

Post by Random_BSD_Geek »

ransom1538 wrote: post #111
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person. Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with si…

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ab…

This was an uncannily accurate characterization of my time at one of these companies.
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