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Comment by olivierduval | Hacker News Reader

Actually I think that one of the specific problem of IT is that experience is not really "usefull" because - from outside of IT (management, HR) - there's always new tools/technology/buzzwords that SEEM to replace old technologies...

So why pay more to hire an experienced IT man that will not know the latest techno-fad when all you need is a junior that knows them a little bit and is waaaayy cheaper.

Moreover - from a management & HR point of view - there's always IT problems. You know: nobody notice when everything run smoothly (and it's a signal to let go some people) but everybody notice when there's an IT problem!

So let's take the cheapest...

BTW I'm 52 in France and notice this too here. And I don't know how to explain why experience matters... :-(

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With experience comes pattern recognition. You can see traps 10 steps ahead of your junior peers. Yes, they can experience personally those steps faster but you can spot 5 of them reading emails with your morning coffee.

My problem now is stopping myself from thinking 20 steps ahead and thinking of all work being pointless. It's a mental trick you play on yourself if "maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'll learn something, chop wood, carry water" and I always learn something.

> With experience comes pattern recognition.

How do you put a dollar value on that though? If I can hire either 2 junior programmers for $100k, or 1 senior programmer for $200k.....how the heck am I supposed to know that this guy can pattern-recognize an extra $100k of value??

It's on the hiring manager to decide what if they need a senior or a junior. High functioning teams need a mixture of both skill sets.

Your job in the interview is to show that you are a senior. Not to make business decisions for them.

Understood, but I'm asking how the hiring manager should be able to tell that.

Here's where I'm coming from: at every company I've worked at (besides start-ups) managers spend 2-3 months on rank-and-yank evaluations. That is an incredible amount of effort, from incredibly expensive people. But its worth it because getting the yearly evaluations right matters.

It takes so long, because its hard to do. So how, pray tell, is somebody supposed to be able to tell, just from the kind of interviews which happen today, whether they are worth more than two junior programmers or not?

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