Experience: bane or boon?

When I was in my early twenties and hunting for my first job, I was stumped by this daunting barrier: experience. Every job that looked promising seemed to require it.

Worse, the experience barriers set by companies seemed unreasonable. They were disproportionate to the time required to learn the requisite skills. Everything from a merchandiser to an analyst programmer required 10+ years of experience. A middle management role required 15+ years, and a senior manager 20+.

I decided to apply anyway. After a few disappointments, I landed myself a job.

Fast forward two and a half decades, and we see an inversion of this previous attitude towards experience, particularly in Sri Lanka. Almost every job is now an internship, an industry placement, or an opening in a global graduate program. A smattering of experience is sometimes considered a bonus.

It is a bit of a paradox, because people are getting healthier, and living and working longer now than they ever did. I didn’t think too much of it though, having myself spent much of my time scouting for “young talent”, on behalf of the companies I worked or consulted for. After all, school leavers and fresh graduates are both affordable and moldable. Also, from a Sri Lankan macroeconomic perspective, a focus on hiring young adults reduces graduate unemployment and mitigates youth unrest.

However, just the other day I saw an acquaintance of mine, who is an investor and entrepreneur of sound repute, pose this question in social media. Whom would you hire, an experienced candidate or a clever junior with a great attitude? And why? My curiosity was piqued.

As someone who has taken an active interest in uncovering progressive trends and patterns in organization development, I thought I ought to cultivate a considered view on this matter, and seek constructive criticism from others.

The real question is, what value does experience bring? When one thinks and researches a bit about this topic, it becomes obvious that experience carries many advantages. Let’s explore a few examples of such advantages, and the boundaries within which they exist.

1.    Higher technical skill levels

An experienced person is more likely to achieve the same outcome faster, and with a higher degree of quality. So experienced lumberjacks are more likely to cut, hall and stack faster, safer and neater, saving space. Experienced Python programmers are more likely to code faster, with lesser defects, and use more extensible designs.

However, there is a definite curve to the acquisition of expertise for any narrowly defined skill, be it Python programming or lumberjacking. After some time, the benefit of further experience adds little value. So more experience is good, as long as it is within a reasonable timeframe during which one could get better at the skill. This duration might be three months for lumberjacking, and three years for python programming.

2.    Greater communication and interpersonal skills

Let’s face it. Most of us come from family and educational backgrounds that are not all that challenging to our personalities. Personalities that we formed in early childhood. Work environments out in the wide world can be much more challenging than formal education. As kids and young adults in College or University, we can still afford to hide from people and situations that don’t agree with us.

Not so at work. As the years go by, we experience a rich, wide variety of people, situations and interpersonal challenges. Situations that break the boundaries of our childhood personalities, and expand our capacities to work with difficult people or adverse situations.

As we work more, we express ourselves better and with more confidence, and work with others more cleverly and fruitfully. This kind of social learning is more or less a steady ramp over time, and there are no caveats to it.

However good or “bad” an interpersonal skillset one started off with, one is better at working with other people at 30 than at 20, and at even better at 40 than at 30, and so on, provided one has accrued no significant degradation in cognitive ability, through illness or substance abuse.

Barring acute mental illnesses, even those who suffer from certain chronic personality disorders manage to develop strategies for dealing with their own deficiencies, and get along better with others over time. The severity of every interpersonal handicap ranging from the fear of public speaking to anger tantrums diminishes at least to some degree, with time and experience.

3.    Superior strategic thinking

Our vast array of work experiences are unconsciously distilled and sorted by our brains, into good working patterns and practices. Particularly in those of us whose experiences have been progressive; where we have succeeded in taking on more responsibilities or tougher jobs over time. The patterns themselves that experience uncovers, would of course range far and wide, depending on what we’ve been doing.

If we consider the software engineering profession as an example, it could mean the adoption of design patterns that one has discovered or emulated with success, a deep appreciation for the end-user’s perspective, over parochial notions of functional completeness, or the adoption of superior team collaboration algorithms and frameworks like Scrum, Scaled Agile and EOS, which reduce waste and time to market.

A rookie Scrum master might follow vanilla Scrum because its hip, and relatively easy to grasp. But the moment a misguided client or boss proposes a poorer substitute, like some corny “hybrid” process that breaks the core algorithm and hinders progress, the newbie might simply adopt it without questioning.

More generic examples of work patterns that experienced professionals gyrate toward might include keeping the eye on the ball, judging opportunity cost, delegation, mentorship, servant leadership, leadership by example, leadership in a crisis, restructuring with growth, compromise, win-win bargaining and a myriad others. We might have heard or read of such “obvious” collaboration strategies in textbooks, but they become ingrained as fundamental, indispensable knowledge only through experience, and particularly through failure.

4.    An awareness of popular bad ideas and common pitfalls

Mischaracterization of daily planning meetings as status meetings for the benefit of higher authorities, is a great example of a common pitfall in the management of software development projects. While regular planning and prompt assistance from stakeholders adds a lot of value, regular status updates and adverse commentary add little towards a project’s journey. A brainstorming meeting must end up with an action plan.

There are many other proven ways of messing things up, that experience can forestall. Continuing with examples from software development, corrupting Scrum into a sequence of mini-waterfalls, mandating functional development in every sprint to show overt progress, leading to bug pileup and product brittleness, or overengineering simple requirements and under engineering complex ones, are situations experienced leads proactively avoid.

In a more general setting, a person with progressive experience and a taste for professional growth wouldn’t manage by clichés, become a boss’s servant or make black and white assessments.

When I began working, I detested discrimination of any kind, to the point where I wanted affirmative action to correct past wrongdoings in wider society. So if I saw a person from a historically marginalized group of any sort, I’d favor that person, making an extra effort to uplift their knowledge and position within the team. 

However, as the years went by, I began to see a drawback to affirmative action. I grasped that while discrimination must be countered at all costs on an individual basis, that having quotas to adjust big picture demographics of a workplace was a harmful idea.

It violated the principle of fair competition at every opportunity, but more importantly, it led to poorer outcomes for the company and society as a whole, thanks to the “smarter” person for the job being sidelined. The “less smart” person can mess things up real bad, even with special help. I realized that contrary to popular belief in the humanities and social sciences, equality of outcomes is not a desirable objective to achieve.

There are many such popular bad ideas that experience can alert us to.

5.    An ability to see through facades and judge the true character of a situation

You are a sales rep, fresh out of university, and working for a consulting firm. You are faced with a client who says “Don’t worry. As a large firm, our contractor payment process is overloaded, lagging and quirky. We’ll pay you in a few weeks, send us the invoice for the advance payment. Meantime let’s start work, so we save time.”

Your client is new, but they have a big name in the industry they serve. The person you are dealing with shows real gravitas. You check with your boss if you can extend credit, and she says “follow your gut”. You take up the contract and get cracking with a team.

Three months later, your invoices remain unsettled, and your work-in-progress is now shared with your client. When pressed for payment, they politely say they’ve changed their mind, and apologize for the inconvenience. They also sight some complex but plausible argument to justify their withdrawal. You could sue, but it’s not worth your company’s time and effort.

This example is a mere caricature, but this category of “situational character assessment” problem plagues companies all the time. Are we dealing with a sincere party? Will they treat us fairly? Are they worth our time?

We absolutely must employ tactics to address the needs and predicaments of our clients. But we also must make our own evaluation of their motives, and the engagement risk involved. If we are poor at this task, we can be played out, or at the other extreme, we could lose legitimate business due to our risk averseness or shortsightedness.

There is nothing like experience to foretell risk in complex situations. The more complex deals you’ve contributed to, the greater your ability to judge them. Not because you develop some magical capacity to read minds, but because you’d have in your head a set of first principles surrounding fair dealing. Like not getting into Pareto optimal contracts.

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The above advantages by no means form an exhaustive list. But hopefully it helps us form a general idea for the kind of advantage that experience brings to the table. Like allowing us to see the big picture, and imagine how things could unfold over months or years.

If one were to summarize the value of experience, one could say that it brings in social intelligence, problem solving patterns and wisdom. Some people think of wisdom entirely in terms of esoteric knowledge. The word conjures mental images of grey haired gurus meditating under trees, contemplating an exit from our deep existential mess. But wisdom has a much more practical place in human development than we usually imagine.

Wisdom is about exploiting lifelong neural plasticity and resilience. It is about the maturation of the frontal cortex and the consequent aptitude for objective strategizing. Those below 25 years have an overload of connections and neurotransmitters in their frontal cortex, which inhibits them from such strategizing in the first place. Its only once we pass this age that we even get the potential to develop our social skills considerably.

So when we create a job description for a Python programmer, whose algorithmic abilities and familiarity with the language is all we are looking for, we then might be wanting to limit experience to a couple of years, and lean heavily on cleverness, attitude and innate ability demonstrated at an interview.

But if we are creating job descriptions for roles requiring a great deal of human leadership and situational knowledge, then we might want to shoot for a long and rich experience. Roles that could potentially transform an organization’s position and worth by an order of magnitude, with the right person playing them. Without being too specific, all CXOs, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Directors, Heads, Managers, Leaders, Consultants, Architects, Coaches, Advisors and suchlike fall into this category.

Unless of course these titles are meant to be mere decorations for dowry boosting… 

Further reading

1.    The development of the frontal cortex and its impact on behavior: https://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/dude-wheres-my-frontal-cortex