> 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.
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.
> 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.
But all other things being equal are you still suggesting that experience is a negative?
Problem is, now that I am older I really don't want to be stereotyped as one of those dinosaurs.
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.
Well, you get the idea. :)
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.
That said, a hard pass fail filter is a bad idea. Much better to score and rank.
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fresh grads tend to be empiricists, whereas experienced people tend to have fixed technical views that are often outdated.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.
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.
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".
45 is pretty much right in the middle of the adult years. (Hence "middle-aged")
This is such a horrible misconception that I think you've never worked with senior people in your life.
> 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?
> 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.
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.