well, experience is just data and so its use in solving problems requires its input to an algorithm, which in this case resides in wetware. In other words, i su

well, experience is just data and so its use in solving problems requires its input to an algorithm, which in this case resides in wetware. In other words, i suppose the value of experience depends entirely on the person who possess it. We need to hire a couple programmer/analyst. No threshold experience level was required, because we want the best talent. After interviewing a dozen or so candidates, it occurred to me that someone with average intellectual horsepower, never seemed to mine the maximum value from the experience that they had. Why? Either (i) they seemed to just store their experiences as a look-up table and then access it as a proxy for genuine creative thinking ("sure, i've seen that problem before, and we solved it this way ...." Granted, sometimes this expedient is just what you need, but it's undesirable if one's cognitive repertoire is limited in this way; or (ii) they failed to abstract that experience into broadly applicable principles. (I suspect this is the failure that is responsible when someone says "he/she has does not have five years of experience, they have one year of experience, five times." Without abstraction, unless your memory/recall is essentially perfect, it's difficult to actually use your experience to gain leverage over a new problem.