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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

#71

Post by eastbound »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #69
eastbound wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers… You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.

Can you disclose which company you work for / what your company does?

Not much, I’d like to remain anonymous, sorry. We’re doing apps for Jira and Confluence Cloud.

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

#72

Post by cxr »

wulke wrote: post #32

This was also true in the military: At basic training, our drill instructors often said that recruits with no experience shooting weapons were easier to train than other recruits who had experience because it was much easier to teach best practices to someone who was a "blank slate" than it was to retrain best practices to someone who learned improper methods. I haven't exactly seen this idea like-for-like in the "co…

This is a good analogy but inadequate. What Dan is saying goes beyond that. In the scenario you're describing, it is rational to prefer those recruits—for exactly those reasons. The behavior that Dan describes involves a heap of irrationality.

Dan's piece that he linked (about "Mike") really is important to understand the thing that he's referring to.

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/>

(Kudos on being able to yes-and the post, though. Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.)

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

#73

Post by JacobThreeThree »

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…

QA gets looked down on for sure. Only put your QA experience for a job with QA in the title.

Ironically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, finding good QA people, and people who want to do QA, is difficult.

Has anyone else experienced QA stigma?

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

#74

Post by CSMastermind »

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…

Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates.

> Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.

Strongly agree with this point.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

dilyevsky wrote: post #39
strgcmc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not). We may all pre…

> As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s By that same logic most managers also fall into B just like ICs. So that statement is incorrect - Bs are perfect material for empire building and As are usually not

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by cxr »

bumby wrote: post #3

This shows the distinction between the value of resumes (whether it’s school or job or whether) is in large part just signaling and not actually about skill set.

Relevant comment of mine from a previous, mostly unrelated thread (context was "Berkeley gives you a parking space if you work there and win a Nobel"):

> The rich get richer. I remember filling out school and early job applications. I was struck by how my list of awards and recognitions was kind of a sham—most of them were each a consequence of some earlier achievement, and so on. It felt like getting a check and being able to cash it more than once.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760101

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

#79

Post by madrox »

mbg721 wrote: post #27
r3012 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA.

A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.

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

#80

Post by antonymy »

beebeepka wrote: post #62
antonymy wrote: post #33

I think it's also about the "culture fit" that these high prestige tech companies look for. Young people fresh out of school will not have been "tainted" by the workplace culture of other companies. Moreover, young people in general, but especially those still in the highly social school mindset, tend to be influenced by peers more easily than adults, especially jaded adults. This all makes young people fresh out of…

My current employer is investing heavily into - I wouldn't say hordes, but they are many - juniors because "culture" sculpting Devs for our specific needs. Or at least that's the official story. While these reasons may be real, I think it boils down to money and loyalty. Can't blame them but yeah, makes me feel a bit uneasy

Yes, naivete is the the other issue besides culture. People without work experience, especially tech work experience, won't push back as hard or negotiate as effectively with their management, which translates to lower salary and a willingness to go along with what the company wants. I don't want to paint young folks with too broad a brush though, I've met some young coworkers that were pretty savvy, it's just in general what I have seen.
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