Myth of years of working experience

In the recruitment process, even if your phone interview screening job is very good, there is a concept that is often distorted. There is a talent agency named flat rate recruitment in Australia. Their Andrew Stuart wrote to me and told me a very good story. I will extract the following excerpt to illustrate this problem:

I have a customer working on an advanced security application. I deliver talent to them, one by one, and all of them are returned. The reason is that almost all of them say that these people "do not have enough underlying coding experience ". However, the people I sent have done things like designing and developing operating systems, advanced memory management, or developing other highly complex applications. But my customers are not interested. They asked the candidate to do the underlying coding in a specific field in the previous job and to have practical experience. Fortunately, I finally found a candidate-he was a very smart software engineer, and he almost completed an excellent computer Simulator-, he has almost no experience in underlying coding in the specific fields required by the customer.

I told the customer, "I have a great guy who doesn't have the underlying coding experience, but I think you should hire him ." They initially held an extremely skeptical attitude. I strongly advise them to give them an interview opportunity. "Look, this guy is a very good software engineer. Although he does not have the underlying coding experience in a specific field as required, but if you hire him, give him 3 ~ In six months, he will be the kind of super software engineer with underlying coding experience you want ."

They interviewed him and hired him. That is, a few weeks of effort, he soon became the smartest programmer in the company. He quickly master their underlying coding technology, and he is better at learning than others in the company. Every time I contact that customer, they will praise this employee because he has become the technical backbone of the company. Since then, the company has no longer focused its recruitment on candidates whose previous work experience and required technologies fully match. Instead, they began to focus on finding and hiring the smartest and most enthusiastic engineers.

From the day I remembered it, the myth of years of working experience has penetrated into the software industry. But it is harmful, and the effect is often counterproductive. It is hard to imagine that many companies are obsessed with employing people with exactly the same experience and technology. As a result, how many talented software engineers have been rejected.

They seem to have forgotten,Software developers are best at learning.Employers are looking for people who are enthusiastic, motivated, flexible, self-learning, and capable of programming in any language, and then find some interesting projects for them.

There is no essential link between working experience and programming skills.This has been proved again and again. I have worked in any specific technical field for 6 ~ After 12 months, you will either be proficient or continue to mix up. No matter how many years of "experience" other programmers claim, this is not important. They may even be ignorant of what they are doing. Why will outstanding programmers soon be able to look at their colleagues with a certain degree of suspicion? The reason is here. Maybe this is the only reasonable explanation, that is, the deviation between experience and skills is already quite common in the software engineering field!

After learning about this, if you see that a company is still pursuing the myth of working experience and years in its recruitment process, do you still want to work in this company? Maybe not.

So I have the following point of view: It is very foolish to write "requires y years of work experience on X platform" in your recruitment advertisement! As long as the applicant has 6 months or 1 year of work experience, no longer than working years! Instead, let's focus on other aspects that can show differences in capabilities. Platform experience is just a baseline and should not be a crucial consideration.

In other words, if you are looking for a job, you can ~ Five years of XX technical experience "such recruitment requirements to determine the company's employment path. The higher the service life requirement for a particular technical field, the more likely they are to have no idea how to recruit people. Therefore, the teams they build may also be mediocre.

I am not saying that work experience is irrelevant in software development. On the contrary, experience is important. However, we have to fully consider the experience of a developer and realize that the time invested by people is not automatically converted into skills. Otherwise, you may reject some super software engineers, just because they lack "N years of work experience" in your small technical field-this is a pity!