
What good is experience? - maccman
http://justinkan.com/what-good-is-experience?
======
jonnathanson
_"is it possible to fake experience by getting advice?"_

Typically, you have to live out the words of the advice before honestly coming
to understand them. Advice -- especially great advice -- is often received as
theoretical, removed from specific context, and thus filed away in the deepest
recesses of the mind. It doesn't come back to top of mind until a specific
situation is encountered, and the advice is suddenly recalled. Then it clicks.

Theoretical advice is generally incomplete unless/until activated by personal
context. Advice isn't a substitute for experience, but rather, a framework
through which to process experience.

~~~
sidman
This is so true. I met people during the course of my life whom i sometimes
think back on and say, why didn't i just do what s/he said and i wouldn't be
in this mess.

It was only after i screwed something up, lost money or ended up not exactly
where i wanted did i think back and say .. so that is what s/he meant. Then
only after the fact can i take positive action towards the advice previously
given and rectify the situation

One of the things i sometimes wonder is, is it just me that can not take
advice unless i live it or does everyone else experience it ?

Reason i wonder this is i see people take advice and avoid getting themselves
in a jam and i just wonder if they interpret advice differently and possibly
have the ability to play out the different situations in their head better and
hence can see what the advice really means before they actually need to live
it.

------
lmm
Now that I have experience... nope, it's still not worth anything. I honestly
feel I'm writing less good code than I did in my late teens - I'm less
ambitious, and I take longer to get things done. I know a bit more about
certain technologies, but honestly I can pick the important bits of anything
up in a couple of days. My experience has got me better-paying jobs, but that
seems to be all it's good for.

(And yes, I am in a best-coder-in-the-room situation. Straying from the topic
a bit, where does one go not to be that? I don't have the skills (or the
appetite for risk) to found a startup. I've wondered about the big-name tech
companies (google, twitter), but my limited experience so far has been that
the bigger a company, the worse. It seems like by the time I've heard of a
potential employer they're already past the point where they'd be fun to work
for)

~~~
easp
Have you gone back to look at the code you wrote as a teenager?

~~~
lmm
Yeah; I still work on some of it occasionally. There are parts where I know
something new, and of course it has its share of hacks and corner cases, but
it's good code.

------
dustingetz
two implications:

1\. there's a huge difference between "oh, i can pick up rails in a week" and
"7 years of rails experience". being super smart is insufficient for certain
employers. you want the guy making foundation technical choices to have
already learned from his mistakes

2\. if you're in your twenties, and you're the best
coder/entrepreneur/whatever you know, your hubris is blinding you to your
potential, should you work with people more experienced than you. this is not
to say you can't win the startup lottery when you're young, but your long term
expectation is higher if you learn from others before you do.

~~~
jazzychad
re 2: exactly right. when I came out of college after 4 years of C classes, I
thought I was the greatest. Then I went to work for Cisco with battle hardened
C masters and found out I knew nothing. Learning from my co-workers was the
best education I got.

~~~
sliverstorm
Never forget; "big fish, small pond"

------
mikeleeorg
I once heard an anecdote that the 3rd version of a system is when it starts to
become really efficient.

The 1st version is rife with hacks and inefficiencies, but it works.

The 2nd version builds upon all the learnings of the first version, but is
bloated because every little lesson learned is applied.

The 3rd version is where the experience and data gained from the first two
iterations really starts paying off. The code is more efficient and the team
knows what is truly important and what isn't.

P.S. Has anyone else heard this anecdote before as well? I've tried tracking
down its origin to no avail.

~~~
felipemnoa
"First you make it work, then you make it right, and finally you make it fast"

~~~
elangoc
I wonder about this style of thinking. In particular, the distinction between
making it work and making it right.

I've read The Pragmatic Programmer, and early-on, it mentions "broken windows"
principle -- fix errors as soon as you notice them, or else they'll get more
difficult for you to fix as time goes by. And like broken windows are like a
green-light for a neighborhood to decline, unfixed hacks similarly invite poor
quality code.

In practice, do "working" and "working well" end up being sort of the same as
suggested by the broken windows principle? Or Is "make it work" refer to
making a quick prototype, and "make it right" refer to filling out substantial
functionality?

~~~
felipemnoa
>>I wonder about this style of thinking. In particular, the distinction
between making it work and making it right.

The reason for this style of thinking applies to projects that you don't
really have a clear path on how to implement them. A good example would be
building a humanoid robot. Along the way you learn what works and what doesn't
and you end up with a project that works, sort of. Now that you have a better
understanding of the problem you re-architect the entire project, if needed,
to make it easier to maintain long term.

Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. You don't have to wait till the end
to re-architect a project. You could treat each major sub-module as a project
of its own and apply this same thinking.

------
j45
Experience is not a track record.

If there's one skill thats invaluable in any industry, it's a track record; of
problem solving experience. An education simply won't give this unless you're
possibly in some extended research role.

If you are lucky enough to get an education, it's another foundation to work
from, but it will not make up for experience resulting in a track record.

Assuming this post refers to the track record of positively learning from our
experience; we see the world does kind of run this way. Can't always fake it
till you make it forever.

Having a bit of both:

Experience and track record of results will always beat education. Why?
Education and theoretical stuff isn't in the real world often enough.

Experience, resulting in track record of successfully overcoming challenges is
very, very valuable.

~~~
mustafa0x
> If you are lucky enough to get an education, it's another foundation to work
> from, but it will not make up for experience resulting in a track record.

> Experience and track record of results will always beat education.

I see these as two very separate things. Why do you compare them?

~~~
j45
People connect them as if they are related. In the tech space it's not the
case so much but it's the prevailing mindset in many, many industries.

------
tmurray
"You know some things to be impossible. Most things that were impossible or
impractical years ago became possible or will become possible some time later.
Your experience might tell you that something you want to do can’t be done.
Other people will go on to do them."

As I started to gain experience and learned about what sort of things worked
and what didn't, a boss of mine gave me a wonderful piece of advice: even if
you're 100% sure that the answer to a question is no, give yourself ten or
fifteen minutes to think it over a bit before responding. What you may have
seen in the past may not apply anymore, and if you give yourself some time to
think about a proposal you may be able to recognize some really novel or
useful ideas.

------
francoisdevlin
It's funny because it's hard to understand the value of experience until you
have some.

~~~
crazygringo
If there were some way to change this... the world would be a far better
place.

~~~
drawkbox
Or... nobody would ever try anything to gain experience, always someone
better. I think it is a great system, ego actually makes us dumb enough to go
get that experience. Truly there is always someone better, but our ego tells
us we are or can be the best. It is a dichotomy.

~~~
mustafa0x
> Or... nobody would ever try anything to gain experience, always someone
> better.

Could you please clarify?

------
fusiongyro
On the other hand, some things really are just impossible, and attacking those
problems with youthful zeal will not change that.

In my experience, when people take something we all agree is impossible and
start doing it, it is usually because they've redefined the problem in such a
way that forward effort can be made. Termination checking comes to mind. It
isn't that the impossible becomes possible (mostly), it's that we find a
smaller or different domain in which progress is possible and useful.

~~~
apu
The number of things that are truly impossible is actually quite small
(particularly in the domain of startups). Many things are just conventionally
thought of as "impossible" because current circumstances make them seem that
way.

------
bdr
"And lastly, something I’ve been wondering: is it possible to fake experience
by getting advice?"

It must be hard, because so few people seem to do it. The history of humanity
would look different if we didn't all seem to have to repeat the same
mistakes.

I suppose at a hypothetical extreme you could be a Chinese Room-like puppet of
the advisor. But in real life you have to generalize at some point. Behind the
words of the advice is the _understanding_ , which is the hard part.
Understanding doesn't even necessarily follow from one's own experience. It
takes the hard but irreplaceable work of reflection. One can try to reverse
engineer understanding from advice, but regardless we can say that while
experience may not be necessary, advice is not sufficient.

(In some vague sense of work-dimensionality: advice < understanding <=
experience.)

------
doug1001
well, experience is just data and so its use in solving problems requires its
input to an algorithm, which in this case resides in wetware. In other words,
i suppose the value of experience depends entirely on the person who possess
it.

We need to hire a couple programmer/analyst. No threshold experience level was
required, because we want the best talent. After interviewing a dozen or so
candidates, it occurred to me that someone with average intellectual
horsepower, never seemed to mine the maximum value from the experience that
they had. Why?

Either (i) they seemed to just store their experiences as a _look-up table_
and then access it as a proxy for genuine creative thinking ("sure, i've seen
that problem before, and we solved it this way ...." Granted, sometimes this
expedient is just what you need, but it's undesirable if one's cognitive
repertoire is limited in this way; or (ii) they failed to _abstract_ that
experience into broadly applicable principles. (I suspect this is the failure
that is responsible when someone says "he/she has does not have five years of
experience, they have one year of experience, five times." Without
abstraction, unless your memory/recall is essentially perfect, it's difficult
to actually use your experience to gain leverage over a new problem.

------
gav
Experience is practicing making mistakes on somebody else's dime.

It gives you the understanding that something is a good or a bad decision
sooner than somebody who hasn't had this practice.

~~~
rralian
Experience doesn't have to be on someone else's dime. In fact, if you want to
really learn your lesson, there's no better way than to make your mistakes on
your own dime.

~~~
gav
You're right. I was thinking more about the benefits of hiring experienced
people.

------
maratd
> And lastly, something I’ve been wondering: is it possible to fake experience
> by getting advice?

Yes and no. You need to have some experience to understand the advice and
interpret it to your situation. Everyone provides advice from their
perspective, which is absolutely useless to you, unless you have the
experience to convert that to your situation and learn from it.

------
protomyth
true experience is knowing at exactly what time and date you would go back in
time to kick your own butt

Experience tends to pre-empt innovation: I really don't think this is caused
by experience, I think it is caused by habit. I know a lot of people who have
experience who have said to me "We did X, Y, and Z at my previous gigs, but
I've been thinking...." Don't fall into habits and keep the sense of what if
and experience provide a heck of a platform for innovation.

Experience takes time to get: yep - especially if you don't listen closely to
the people who have already taken the hit.

You know some things to be impossible: more along the path of habits
overshadowing experience. I had a huge amount of experience with Sybase
databases. I knew some things were impossible given how they worked, but it
didn't stop me from exploring when the next version showed up. Don't allow
yourself to build a set of superstitions that overshadow changing conditions.

------
mappu
Off-topic: how can anyone read this? His layout keeps popping up and down, and
the second you scroll away from the top, the image in the corner breaks and
the text goes all fuzzy.

Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/6SCgN.png>, no addons in use.

~~~
kiiski
I tried it with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera on a Mac, and didn't have
any problems. Well, selecting text in chrome was a bit wrong, but not exactly
broken.

------
richieb
Good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgement.

------
robbywashere
Thanks for the article, because inexperienced guys like me have it pretty easy
finding jobs right now with just a lil php background

------
ed209
paraphrasing Paul Arden: "Experience is lazy"

<http://cl.ly/3A0j1O0d180e2p3O1K02> from <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Not-How-
Good-Want/dp/0714843377/>

------
prezjordan
Off topic: His website is amazingly cool. I wonder how achieves anonymous
"kudos." IP? Cookies?

~~~
fishtoaster
That's 'Svbtle' (<http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle>) - the subject of some
controversy last month. See <http://natewienert.com/codename-obtvse>

~~~
tptacek
"Controversy" meaning: guy starts blog network, writes custom, private
software for it, words the promo copy for the blog network somewhat
arrogantly, and so someone clones his design almost verbatim and launches a
hello-world Rails blog backend with a parodic name.

Of course, now look at:

<http://svbtle.com/>

Is there any doubt what the value is here? That is an awesome front page. If
you can clone that, you have better things to do with your time than pick
fights with other developers.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
I find the UI kind of ugly. I do like the idea of having a lighter weight
posting/record interface.

~~~
tptacek
I like it, but what I really liked about the idea was the network.

------
wr1472
Advice I accept, experience I truly appreciate.

------
EREFUNDO
Boom!

~~~
MortenK
Because it's just that impressive

------
carguy1983
Interestingly, the older you get, the more obvious this all seems. Probably
because you become more experienced.

