I think the author's message is spot on, but I disagree with some of the details. Mainly:
> Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive
I can see why someone would say this. If you looking to innovate, you don't want employees always saying, "This is just the way we've always done it." At the same time, people with industry experience can avoid novice pitfalls.
Also, I cannot stand all the emphasized keywords. I get why he did it, but it's so jarring to read.
What the hell is wrong with this industry that experience in the industry is considered a negative? For every other skill the more you do it the better you get, yet the logic here is that the more one works with tech the worse one gets at it.
The only comparable jobs are high impact sports. An older boxer or football player is assumed to have accumulated injuries that make them a worse value proposition. Are devs the same? Am I slowly accumulating the equivalent of career ending sports injuries the longer I am stuck in a job living like a Dilbert comic?
Probably not. It is really just ageism, and my work history doesn't matter to these hiring managers as long as I'm over 30.
I think you're missing the point. From the article:
> We ran circles around competitors who had teams of B and C players with security expertise but little else going for them.
He feels experience is negative (I'm guessing) because the experienced candidates only have experience. It is implied that they have no other team skills - just their knowledge of the area. It doesn't matter if you hire the world's foremost expert; if they don't mesh with your team, everyone is going to have a bad time.
No. I never said experience is a negative, but I can see how it was implied. I understand where he's coming from, because there are people who are stuck in their ways. That's not an experience issue - that's a people issue.
No problem. I reread your first reply and I think we agree. I've met plenty devs who believe their 10 repeated years of the same experience entitles them to shout down younger devs.
Problem is, now that I am older I really don't want to be stereotyped as one of those dinosaurs.
The way I interpreted is that it's probably negative if your experience is XY years in the same $foobar industry. In other words, the kind of developers who haven't learned new anything since 2000.
I've met people with over a decade of experience in programming and had to convince them that hey, maybe we should write unit tests because customers keep complaining about bugs? Had hard time in doing it because hey you just refresh a browser and see.
Every time you add a filter for a particular trait or attribute, you're removing filtering power on all the other things you're looking for. Want someone with above-average experience in $foo? You've just halved your candidate pool, which means in order to make a hire you have to relax one bit of selection in some other category.
The question isn't whether experience helps. It's whether experience helps more than the worst part of the applicant filter that you're using. If it does, you should use more experience-based filtering. If it doesn't, you shouldn't.
I'm not suggesting that you filter for experience to the exclusion of other attributes. Instead stop filtering against experience, as some seem to be suggesting.
That said, a hard pass fail filter is a bad idea. Much better to score and rank.
> What the hell is wrong with this industry that experience in the industry is considered a negative? For every other skill the more you do it the better you get, yet the logic here is that the more one works with tech the worse one gets at it.
I can believe that experience of doing (say) chemistry 200 years ago might be so different from current practice that it would be of negative value. Tech changes a lot faster than that. Certainly in practice I've found working with experienced people worse than working with fresh grads, because fresh grads tend to be empiricists, whereas experienced people tend to have fixed technical views that are often outdated. (Of course this is just my subjective experience).
> The only comparable jobs are high impact sports. An older boxer or football player is assumed to have accumulated injuries that make them a worse value proposition. Are devs the same? Am I slowly accumulating the equivalent of career ending sports injuries the longer I am stuck in a job living like a Dilbert comic?
Older mathematicians are famously less effective. I honestly feel like I'm less good at my job than when I started. Certainly experience with outdated tools/paradigms seems like a net negative - it will mislead you when working with modern tools/paradigms.
I agree. What I suspect vision founders don't want to hear is that everything that can be done up to this point has already been done. Perhaps not the whole, but the pieces certainly.
They don't like this idea because they want to believe their idea is new and groundbreaking. It may very well be, but the pieces aren't. That's where experience comes in.
There's really great things about being 25. There's really great things about being 45. There's also things that suck about being 25 or 45. One of the things that suck about being 25 is KNOWING that being 45 means you're old and you don't know a damn thing. KNOWING that some 45 year old fart will just get in the way because they're slow and only know Perl. Hell, when you're 25 you simply KNOW so much. Then one day you wake up and you're 45 and you realize that even now you don't know a damn thing.
I guess you're right, it's ageism, but it's also just being 25 and being so sure of everything that you couldn't possibly learn anything from "industry experience".
Some people discover they know nothing at the late 20's, other people at the 30's, by 45 almost everybody already knows how much they don't know (and the ones that don't might be a lost cause already).
I'm closer to 45 than 25 these days and couldn't agree more. Took years to build up the experience I thought I had at 25, still a lot more to learn, wouldn't trade it for the world.
> Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive, for a new company. Could Hollywood execs have started Netflix? Would a book publisher had started Amazon? Jack Dorsey, not Visa execs, started Square. He admitted, when asked how he learned about the world of payments, “We Googled ‘accepting credit cards.'”
He clearly talks about founders and high-level employees, and provides examples. An obvious way of countering him would be to provide counter examples -- which truly innovative companies have been started by industry insiders?
More to the point, what better way to disrupt an industry than be familiar with that industry, and its flaws? Yeah, I agree that being an executive (i.e., the only 'skills' they have is making decisions in a specific environment, i.e., the status quo one) is probably detrimental...but Netflix wasn't originally in the same industry as Hollywood (they started in the soon to decline industry of video rental, and naturally progressed to streaming, and then original content creation). Amazon wasn't in the industry of publishing, they started in the industry of mail order books using this newfangled internet thing. Square isn't in the same industry as Visa; they're a user of Visa's services to build an easy to use payment portal for mobile (Visa even invested in them). Googling 'accepting credit cards' is -exactly what I'd expect- if you're trying to accept Visa, not if you're trying to displace them (because if the latter, who cares how Visa does it?). I think this says more about having -tangential- industry experience. All of them had enough insight into the problems in related industries, without having grown complacent with them, that they either were able to move into those industries (Netflix was able to move into content creation, Amazon was able to move into publishing), or were able to create business models addressing those industry's pain points (Square).
I'm not saying that it's wrong to use people with industry experience. I'm saying don't devalue the people who do. ChemicalWarfare[0] said it best in a sibling comment:
> There are some industries where getting up to speed just with the basic domain knowledge so that you don't have to google every other word/tla in the user story takes a good amount of time.
My point is that people with experience can help spur along development. I'm not calling his statement false, because I know of some company that did it better my way. I disagree (perhaps erroneously), because I know there are not-so-obvious mistakes people can make in this industry that eat up resources.
Getting a bunch of greenhorns together for sake of out with old is probably not ideal. You want people with experience to help avoid traps that prolong your process. Security comes to mind. Security is notoriously hard. And while you may not want to hire only security gurus for your business, it absolutely helps to have someone with security experience in your stable. From the article:
> We ran circles around competitors who had teams of B and C players with security expertise but little else going for them.
That last part is the issue. The employees had little else going for them. Your people with experience should have other qualities going for them. In addition to knowing security, they should be team players, open to new methodologies, effective communicators, and all those other soft skills that make teams function well. A team with no security experience can learn what needs to be learn without issue. I do not deny that. However, expertise doesn't automatically imply that everything else about the candidate is garbage, and having employees to give guidance helps avoid growing pains.
Maybe someone with industry experience could have started those things. I mean, having experience doesn't mean you think the industry is working well right now or doesn't need to change in the future.
Yeah, there are some people in various industries that either couldn't see approaching issues or just flat out ignored that they could be issues.
But there are also people who saw say, the rise of services like Netflix as a positive or likely thing. People in the publishing industry who saw the possibility of selling books online or replacing them with eReaders like the Kindle.
They just might have not done so for other reasons. Perhaps they saw what was coming, but thought they didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset to start their own company. Maybe they did start a company like this up, but they didn't find the right connections or investors or anything else to catch on.
Always been bothered with the assumption that those in 'disrupted' industries are too stubborn to know what could replace their business.
+1. There are some industries where getting up to speed just with the basic domain knowledge so that you don't have to google every other word/tla in the user story takes a good amount of time.
> Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive
I can see why someone would say this. If you looking to innovate, you don't want employees always saying, "This is just the way we've always done it." At the same time, people with industry experience can avoid novice pitfalls.
Also, I cannot stand all the emphasized keywords. I get why he did it, but it's so jarring to read.