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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I'm not at all curious about your year off (other than as incidental conversation if you choose to bring it up). I am curious about your experience and competency, both overall and in terms of recency/currency, as I believe both of those are strongly correlated to your projected contributions to my company.

A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

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The point I'm trying to make is that you do seem to be making this A > B comparison without caring about the quality of those hours. Again, it seems to present the argument in a way that echoes the concerns I've heard. "A" simply starts off with an advantage in how you keep presenting it.

There doesn't seem to be room in your opinion or examples for a pilot with 3k hours flying commercial vs someone with 5k hours flying as a hobby on the weekends. 3k is simply less that 5k, right? You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

If you agree that this is a ridiculous over simplification in order to prove my point then we may be on the same page.

The very nature of your comments makes me envision a women on the other side of your hiring decision wondering why she couldn't get you to focus on the _quality_ of the work and stop fixating on the _quantity_ of time spent doing it. Because that is exactly what I'm trying to do now.

> You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

I didn’t go deep, because this isn’t an aviation forum, but sure the quality of hours matters. Retract, multi, instrument, PIC, dual given, high-performance, turbine, jet, 91, 135, 121, etc all matter. Smash-n-goes in a 172 aren’t the same as flying the line/signing for a transport jet.

Anything past the FAA ATP 1500 hour mark, the quality matters. Before that, quantity dominates for airline candidates.

Blerg. Then also an apology. You did say that your post was in your _opinion_. I chose to engage. You were kind enough to respond and expand on your opinion. If I missed that and used a needlessly harsh tone then please know that was not my intent. At least not originally.

No sweat; it's impossible in a typical HN-length post to cover every possible expansion of an argument; I took no offense to the post that ended up flagged/dead [by others] and hope I gave no offense with my own.

>A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

This example, along with ones others have given, all reduce to the same thing: You are not interested in determining the skills of your candidate - you are interested in determining experience. Presumably with a dubious belief that your metric is a good proxy for those skills.

>I am curious about your experience and competency

Yet your example only addresses one of these.

To the last point, I believe that, ceteris paribus, competency increases with experience and decreases with time out of the daily exercise of those skills.

Of course everyone tries to evaluate absolute competency (ceteris non paribus) in an interview. I’m not suggesting that anyone stop doing that. I am stating a belief that experience is positively correlated and perhaps a necessary precondition of competency. If that's the case, considering experience as a component of the overall evaluation is indicated.

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