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two implications: 1. there's a huge difference between "oh, i can pick up rails in a week" and "7 years of rails experience". being super smart is insufficient

two implications: 1. there's a huge difference between "oh, i can pick up rails in a week" and "7 years of rails experience". being super smart is insufficient for certain employers. you want the guy making foundation technical choices to have already learned from his mistakes 2. if you're in your twenties, and you're the best coder/entrepreneur/whatever you know, your hubris is blinding you to your potential, should you work with people more experienced than you. this is not to say you can't win the startup lottery when you're young, but your long term expectation is higher if you learn from others before you do.

j45 15y ago
Nice points. One thing that I'd be sure to think about is that more experience isn't just in years, it's in hours spent, and how well/quickly one learns to find and connect the dots to get that picture of experience.
jazzychad 15y ago
re 2: exactly right. when I came out of college after 4 years of C classes, I thought I was the greatest. Then I went to work for Cisco with battle hardened C masters and found out I knew nothing. Learning from my co-workers was the best education I got.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Never forget; "big fish, small pond"
- heretohelp 15y ago
  Hi from ##C on Freenode. We love college kids like you :D
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Experience is non-linear though. X years of parking your butt in a chair staring at code doesn't make you an expert automatically, it doesn't even necessarily make you better than someone who has only spent 2 weeks learning the language or platform. I'd rather have a JWZ, Brendan Eich, or Linus Torvalds in their 20s working on my project even if they didn't know the language than some paycheck coding drone from the enterprise trenches who has a million years of experience in doing mutate-compile-repeat development in the exact same development stack.
- barik 15y ago
  That's because most corporations seem to define experience incorrectly. Experience is not simply time. Instead, I prefer Hunt's definition of experience: "By experience, I mean specifically that performing this skill results in a change of thinking. As a counterexample, consider the case of the developer who claims ten years of experience, but in reality it was one year of experience repeated nine times. That doesn’t count as experience." Unfortunately, the reality is that most companies equate experience with years; just look at the typical job postings as an example of this mentality.
jamesbritt 15y ago
Try not to be the smartest person in the room.
- jsyedidia 15y ago
  Unless you're the smartest person in the world. In that case, trying not to be the smartest person in the room is wasted effort. Of course, if you're the smartest person in the world, you already know that.
  - vog 15y ago
    Taking this thought experiment a bit further: In case you are the smartest person in the world, the advice is still a reasonable thing to do: How will you ever know you are the smartest-in-world if you don't try to find smarter people? On the other hand, you'll probably never know for sure, as it is wasted effort to compare yourself with literally every other person in the world. So pretending not to be the smartest person in the world is a totally sensible thing to do even if you are.
    - jsyedidia 15y ago
      My previous comment was an attempt at humor, but actually, the notion of "smartest person" is too ill-defined to be very useful. People are smart at different things. For example, one person might be smarter at playing chess than another, while the second might be smarter at writing computer programs. So let's replace the notion of "smartest person" with something better defined, like "most successful at playing chess, as measured by their chess rating." In that case, we know who the best in the world is, it's Magnus Carlsen. It would indeed be a waste of time for him to seek chess matches where there was somebody better than him, but it is in fact good advice for everybody else to seek to play against better opponents. However, the strongest players all find that inevitably, they are nearly always stronger than their opponents. For example, the #2 in the world, Levon Aronian, is stronger unless he plays Carlsen. Every grandmaster finds that the large majority of his games are against weaker opponents. So if you're really "smart," it's good advice to try to surround yourself with "smarter" people, but don't beat yourself up if you find it hard to do--it's an inevitable consequence of mathematics that the "smartest" people will tend to surround themselves with less "smart" people, at least if you're only measuring "smartness" in one way.

j45 15y ago

Nice points. One thing that I'd be sure to think about is that more experience isn't just in years, it's in hours spent, and how well/quickly one learns to find and connect the dots to get that picture of experience.

jazzychad 15y ago

re 2: exactly right. when I came out of college after 4 years of C classes, I thought I was the greatest. Then I went to work for Cisco with battle hardened C masters and found out I knew nothing. Learning from my co-workers was the best education I got.

sliverstorm 15y ago
Never forget; "big fish, small pond"
heretohelp 15y ago
Hi from ##C on Freenode. We love college kids like you :D

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Experience is non-linear though. X years of parking your butt in a chair staring at code doesn't make you an expert automatically, it doesn't even necessarily make you better than someone who has only spent 2 weeks learning the language or platform. I'd rather have a JWZ, Brendan Eich, or Linus Torvalds in their 20s working on my project even if they didn't know the language than some paycheck coding drone from the enterprise trenches who has a million years of experience in doing mutate-compile-repeat development in the exact same development stack.

barik 15y ago
That's because most corporations seem to define experience incorrectly. Experience is not simply time. Instead, I prefer Hunt's definition of experience: "By experience, I mean specifically that performing this skill results in a change of thinking. As a counterexample, consider the case of the developer who claims ten years of experience, but in reality it was one year of experience repeated nine times. That doesn’t count as experience." Unfortunately, the reality is that most companies equate experience with years; just look at the typical job postings as an example of this mentality.

jamesbritt 15y ago

Try not to be the smartest person in the room.

jsyedidia 15y ago
Unless you're the smartest person in the world. In that case, trying not to be the smartest person in the room is wasted effort. Of course, if you're the smartest person in the world, you already know that.
- vog 15y ago
  Taking this thought experiment a bit further: In case you are the smartest person in the world, the advice is still a reasonable thing to do: How will you ever know you are the smartest-in-world if you don't try to find smarter people? On the other hand, you'll probably never know for sure, as it is wasted effort to compare yourself with literally every other person in the world. So pretending not to be the smartest person in the world is a totally sensible thing to do even if you are.
  - jsyedidia 15y ago
    My previous comment was an attempt at humor, but actually, the notion of "smartest person" is too ill-defined to be very useful. People are smart at different things. For example, one person might be smarter at playing chess than another, while the second might be smarter at writing computer programs. So let's replace the notion of "smartest person" with something better defined, like "most successful at playing chess, as measured by their chess rating." In that case, we know who the best in the world is, it's Magnus Carlsen. It would indeed be a waste of time for him to seek chess matches where there was somebody better than him, but it is in fact good advice for everybody else to seek to play against better opponents. However, the strongest players all find that inevitably, they are nearly always stronger than their opponents. For example, the #2 in the world, Levon Aronian, is stronger unless he plays Carlsen. Every grandmaster finds that the large majority of his games are against weaker opponents. So if you're really "smart," it's good advice to try to surround yourself with "smarter" people, but don't beat yourself up if you find it hard to do--it's an inevitable consequence of mathematics that the "smartest" people will tend to surround themselves with less "smart" people, at least if you're only measuring "smartness" in one way.