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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,

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.

hackits 9y ago
Also experience tell's you the person isn't going to do anything inappropriate in front of colleagues and do any sexual misconduct.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Is that why so many higher up people with many years experience get called out for sexual misconduct? I think your argument is not correct...
- bradknowles 9y ago
  Not really. How many people are only being called out now for having done all sorts of inappropriate things, and who are at or near the top of their field? You can be an 80 year old man who is doing totally inappropriate things by sexting pictures of their junk to underage kids. Or haven’t you been watching the news lately?
vikingcaffiene 9y ago
If I could upvote this twice I would.
gicadin 9y ago
Props for describing the problem as an optimization problem. To add to that: Companies are not always looking to hire the best person for the job, but someone that can solve the problems they are facing. Since problems tend to repeat themselves, someone with experience has likely encountered and solved many of the problems they are hired to deal with. This is not saying that having experience in a field means you will be able to solve a problem better than a inexperienced person, it just means they've likely encountered it before (or a variation) and managed to solve it. Business in general are risk averse, and therefore will opt for a guaranteed solution even if its not optimal.
fulafel 9y ago
> 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 time. Even at the cost of having to skim through the text of 50 applications and picking out the interesting sounding ones.
- djellybeans 9y ago
  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 they work on is their own (not the property of clients) and need to deal with massive datasets. My interviews and resumes get rejected from this gap in knowledge. I simply don't have much of that sort of experience. Yet time and again I am faced with high scrutiny because of how many years I've worked in my career. It's about time I update my resume. Perhaps I need to create a much more functional resume, and less chronological based one. Emphasizing my best personal projects and most relevant skills while trimming away the older jobs, to make myself look more fresh.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    > 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.
bradknowles 9y ago
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.
- Symphlion 9y ago
  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
- warrenm 9y ago
  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"

hackits 9y ago

Also experience tell's you the person isn't going to do anything inappropriate in front of colleagues and do any sexual misconduct.

chrisper 9y ago
Is that why so many higher up people with many years experience get called out for sexual misconduct? I think your argument is not correct...
bradknowles 9y ago
Not really. How many people are only being called out now for having done all sorts of inappropriate things, and who are at or near the top of their field? You can be an 80 year old man who is doing totally inappropriate things by sexting pictures of their junk to underage kids. Or haven’t you been watching the news lately?

vikingcaffiene 9y ago

If I could upvote this twice I would.

gicadin 9y ago

Props for describing the problem as an optimization problem. To add to that: Companies are not always looking to hire the best person for the job, but someone that can solve the problems they are facing. Since problems tend to repeat themselves, someone with experience has likely encountered and solved many of the problems they are hired to deal with. This is not saying that having experience in a field means you will be able to solve a problem better than a inexperienced person, it just means they've likely encountered it before (or a variation) and managed to solve it. Business in general are risk averse, and therefore will opt for a guaranteed solution even if its not optimal.

fulafel 9y ago

> 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 time. Even at the cost of having to skim through the text of 50 applications and picking out the interesting sounding ones.

djellybeans 9y ago
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 they work on is their own (not the property of clients) and need to deal with massive datasets. My interviews and resumes get rejected from this gap in knowledge. I simply don't have much of that sort of experience. Yet time and again I am faced with high scrutiny because of how many years I've worked in my career. It's about time I update my resume. Perhaps I need to create a much more functional resume, and less chronological based one. Emphasizing my best personal projects and most relevant skills while trimming away the older jobs, to make myself look more fresh.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  > 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.

bradknowles 9y ago

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.

Symphlion 9y ago
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
warrenm 9y ago
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"