Experience is complicated

There is a tendency in technology nowadays to require x years of experience in some technology in order to get a job when you start out. I am fortunately past that stage myself, and have observed why the current conventional wisdom is foolish, and we need to move to a different hiring paradigm.

Let’s say you are interviewing several candidates for one job.

  1. Candidate A is fresh out of school. Could be a boot camp, could be college. It doesn’t really matter (when I did my boot camp some of the PhDs in the class were remarking how difficult it was). They have an extensive portfolio of using various technologies which are relevant to the role in the target language. They have learned their stuff and have over 10 projects demonstrating fluency in their language. They built all 10 projects over the course of 12 months.
  2. Candidate B is in the middle of their career. They have only been doing the target language for a short amount of time, their work in the target language is extremely limited, and their portfolio is extremely sparse when it comes to the skills you are hiring for. They have evidence of deep expertise in other languages stretching over a decade, but not in the target language.
  3. This candidate is fresh out of school, but they don’t have a portfolio. They say they know the target language. You have no access to anything to prove their claims.

 

Candidate A is ready for the role. They could use some coaching on how to lint their code properly, but that can be taught. Candidate B might not be ready, their depth is in another area of expertise. Candidate C needs to build a portfolio to prove their skills.

 

The problem with the modern hiring paradigm is that it will usually ignore candidates A and C, give candidate B a major lead role in an area they have no expertise in.

What should happen is that they should find a candidate with experience in the target skill set, who can prove they know the language with code which works and passes a simple linting test. That person should be the new manager. The more impressive the project, the better. Candidate A should be hired to a junior role with real responsibilities. Candidate B should either be a non-management role (because being a master web developer does not make you a data scientist, obviously) in the target team or moved to a team where they actually have expertise where they can be a manager. Candidate C should be given a polite letter asking them to construct a portfolio before they apply again. Give them direction on where to go.

This is the problem with most modern hiring practices. They don’t use tools to accurately assess the expertise in the target job, quickly discount candidates who should be hired to a junior role, and often people with years of expertise can be promoted to roles where they are out of their depth. This creates failure.

We need to rethink the entire hiring paradigm. If somebody is able to earn a college degree or pass a bootcamp, they have a good work ethic, full stop. It might make sense to hire all new employees on as temps and then promote them to full time salary in 3-6 months if they prove they are valuable members of the team, but to simply tell people starting in any field that they don’t have “experience” for a role which is labeled as entry level is absolutely absurd.

A college degree is proof of a good work ethic. That’s all you need.

Then you need to see if the person is a good fit for the company. Hire people on for 3-6 months as an hourly employee, and if they work out, give them a salary and full benefits. If they don’t, then it didn’t work.

Put people in places which match their expertise in the skills they demonstrate in their portfolio. If someone has an extensive data science portfolio where they use machine learning to answer questions, don’t put them in a sysadmin position (even if they are capable) place them in a position where they will use as many skills they have demonstrated as possible.

Years of work experience is a meaningless metric, and it is long past time that companies stop using it to determine whether someone should be given an interview. I am planning on developing tools in the future to better assess whether someone has skills better than the methods I have observed in my life so far, but what I do know is that the current system is inefficient, doesn’t promote people who need to be promoted, promotes people out of their depth, and doesn’t hire people who are perfectly capable of doing the job in question.

To be continued.

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