» Quality of Experience Matters; Not Quantity » Managed Chaos by Naresh Jain

Quality of Experience Matters; Not Quantity

While hiring, personally I look for the candidate’s quality of experience. Quantity (Number of years of experience) does not really matter.

As Conan rightly pointed out:

Watch out for people with “10 years” of experience … it’s sometimes 1 year of experience, repeated 10 times

In fact I would go to the extent of saying that their educational background also does not matter. (Sometimes it actually negatively impacts their impression. Someone with a CS background should at least know theoretically about different computer architectures)

The only time I look at number of years of experience is, when someone claims that they have been doing ‘x’ for ‘y’ years. And during discussions about ‘x’ related topics, its apparent that the person does not have the expected depth on the topic. Then I ask myself, “if this person does not have the required depth after spending ‘y’ years, how good is this person at picking up stuff and internalizing it?”

Of course, we need to give them the benefit of doubt. They might be working in a highly viscous environment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 2:07 AM and is filed under Interview Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://developer-in-test.blogspot.com/ Sai Venkat

Interesting post. But I wouldn’t exactly agree with the last point. People who are really interested in learning would still be doing it highly viscous environment. Actually they would be doing it much more there (Personal experience . Those are the people we need to target.
http://developer-in-test.blogspot.com Sai Venkat

Interesting post. But I wouldn’t exactly agree with the last point. People who are really interested in learning would still be doing it highly viscous environment. Actually they would be doing it much more there (Personal experience . Those are the people we need to target.
http://agilefaqs.com/nareshjain.html Naresh Jain

While I agree with you in spirit, and I would love it if the world was this way. Unfortunately reality is something else. Over the last 5 years, having interviewed over 3,000 people, I’ve rarely found this.

Well its easy to say, really interested people will continue to learn even in a highly viscous environment. But if you are constantly firefighting legacy stuff or just not exposed to some of the things out there, its not fair to expect that someone will know it. What bothers me is, when I look at someone’s skillset in their resume, everything they have heard their neighbors speak is in there.

In fact, I would go as far as saying that, its one thing to go browse, get to know new ideas, concepts and trends, may be even do a pilot project. And its very different to actually take a concept and apply it to a real world project. The depth of knowledge is very different in the 2 cases.
http://agilefaqs.com/nareshjain.html Naresh Jain

While I agree with you in spirit, and I would love it if the world was this way. Unfortunately reality is something else. Over the last 5 years, having interviewed over 3,000 people, I’ve rarely found this.

Well its easy to say, really interested people will continue to learn even in a highly viscous environment. But if you are constantly firefighting legacy stuff or just not exposed to some of the things out there, its not fair to expect that someone will know it. What bothers me is, when I look at someone’s skillset in their resume, everything they have heard their neighbors speak is in there.

In fact, I would go as far as saying that, its one thing to go browse, get to know new ideas, concepts and trends, may be even do a pilot project. And its very different to actually take a concept and apply it to a real world project. The depth of knowledge is very different in the 2 cases.
http://jayadeep.com/ Jayadeep Purushothaman

I agree Naresh – I have spent a significant amount of my career in a very viscous environment fighting the hierarchy and wasted significant energy – I should have just walked away, there was no deal fighting the crap. Most of your energy is in fighting the political battles to do some interesting stuff. Inorganic development was almost zero and there would be enough folks to bring an idea down than support any new ideas.

Definitely quality of experience is what matters – somehow people would love quantity most of the time. More years of experience, money, more weight, more gold ornaments etc. etc. They somehow don’t get it.
http://jayadeep.com Jayadeep Purushothaman

I agree Naresh – I have spent a significant amount of my career in a very viscous environment fighting the hierarchy and wasted significant energy – I should have just walked away, there was no deal fighting the crap. Most of your energy is in fighting the political battles to do some interesting stuff. Inorganic development was almost zero and there would be enough folks to bring an idea down than support any new ideas.

Definitely quality of experience is what matters – somehow people would love quantity most of the time. More years of experience, money, more weight, more gold ornaments etc. etc. They somehow don’t get it.