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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

#21

Post by tfehring »

homie wrote: post #6

is there any way out if you find yourself stuck with a couple years of wrong experience?

I went from a life insurance company in the Midwest to a pretty desirable tech company in the last few years. This tweet [0] from patio11 (linked from the posted tweet) basically sums up my path:

> If you’re early career, try to get into a high-status engineering employer or consider a status arbitrage like e.g. a stint at one of the many startups which are known to recruiters but can’t match Google offers and so feel perpetually understaffed.

I went to a YC-funded startup. It wasn't a well-known startup by any means, and there were fewer than 30 employees when I left. I don't think anyone there was ex-FAANG, and they didn't pay at anywhere near FAANG levels. But startup employees are in the talent pool for big tech companies in a way that insurance company employees generally are not.

Anyway, when I had been at the startup for a year, I cold applied for my current position on my current employer's website, and here I am. Zero chance I would have gotten a callback if I'd applied directly from the insurance company, even though I would still have been able to do my current job effectively if I'd never gone to the startup.

[0] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1379852979868631041

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

#22

Post by mbg721 »

madrox wrote: post #4

As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure. Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps…

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.

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

#23

Post by bena »

I think I've felt this a little bit.

As a non-degreed individual, I didn't hear anything from places I would apply. Eventually, I applied for a non-development job at a company that also claimed it developed software. With the hopes I'd be able to kind of prove my chops while in the other role to get moved over.

Luckily, the company I applied for had no fucking clue what they were doing and hired me for a software development position because their entire technology team had just quit like a week ago or something. And while that job essentially started me on my path to where I am now, and I don't consider myself incompetent. They honestly had absolutely no clue on how to evaluate technology credentials.

My resume was my incomplete education, my work in retail, and a bit of the hobbyist development I had done on the Dreamcast.

Now, the job turned out to be an entire shit-show. This was a company who claimed to develop software but didn't have a license for Visual Studio. No one knew how to manage a SQL Server. Etc. They were looking for a glorified help desk technician who could write some config file level stuff for the software package they were a reseller for.

However. They did contract the bulk of their networking to another company. And also contracted with the owner to be the effective CTO or something. Eventually, that guy knew I wasn't happy or challenged at the job. And when he heard I was looking, he just offered me a job. So I became a contractor for him.

Eventually, one of our clients had their developer just walk in the middle of a project and they needed me there like every day to salvage the situation. After a while, they realized it would be more cost effective to just essentially buy me. So now I work for them, and I have for the past 6 or 7 years. Timeline is a little fuzzy. This client is major. You've heard of them. Now, I get recruiters contacting me and solicitations in my email even though I haven't actively looked for a job since 2007. Even though the place I work for is not even a technology company.

Names do matter.

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

#24

Post by r3012 »

mbg721 wrote: post #22
madrox wrote: post #4

As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure. Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps…

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and ta…

> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?

I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

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

#25

Post by thaumaturgy »

I'm experiencing this now and it's taking some energy to not become disillusioned with the industry.

Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists. For any given technology or stack right now, some company out there is doing something cool with it, and they only want to hire people who are already familiar with their particular configuration. The couple of tech interviews I've had so far have really obviously been looking for me to keyword or namedrop some experience with whatever it is that they're using already. There have even been positions where I had like 95% of the desired experience, but that missing 5% was enough to bin me, despite having a pile of unrelated experience.

To be clear, you can make a living as a dev in the guts of a BigCo or for a consultancy or web firm, and these days it's not even a bad living (for now). But if you want to work on something closer to the cutting edge, or more stimulating, you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it.

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

#26

Post by bastardoperator »

This is how Disney tends to or used to operate its theme parks. If you're coming from another theme park chances are you have been trained incorrectly meaning a person with no experience has the advantage. Not saying I agree or disagree, but I can understand why someone could think otherwise.

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

#27

Post by mbg721 »

r3012 wrote: post #24
mbg721 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and ta…

> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.

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

#28

Post by ceras »

r3012 wrote: post #24
mbg721 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and ta…

> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

This doesn't really match my experience for my own career or as a manager. Plenty of great engineers don't have a plan beyond "learn and get better," including those that have traditionally-successful careers (e.g. director+ at top tech company).

I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).

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

#29

Post by avgDev »

I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.

I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers.

I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta.

I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a business, and all the mistakes you have made.

This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong". There are many ways to be successful and this POV is toxic imo.

Edit: I would love to hear what the wrong experience is.

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

#30

Post by glthr »

shmde wrote: post #8

I can tell you this is 110% true in my case. I graduated and landed a very shitty testing job at a big consulting firm. I worked hard like a mule( more like a donkey ) for 11 months. Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job. I resigned the next month. Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applyin…

I have the same personal experience.
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