Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1551662427606986752

by collate • 4 years ago

276 203 4 years ago

This is true for more than just programming.

bumby• 4 years ago

This shows the distinction between the value of resumes (whether it’s school or job or whether) is in large part just signaling and not actually about skill set.

cxr3• 4 years ago

Relevant comment of mine from a previous, mostly unrelated thread (context was "Berkeley gives you a parking space if you work there and win a Nobel"):

The rich get richer. I remember filling out school and early job applications. I was struck by how my list of awards and recognitions was kind of a sham—most of them were each a consequence of some earlier achievement, and so on. It felt like getting a check and being able to cash it more than once.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760101

a9h74j• 4 years ago

This might be called the Matthew effect, IIRC.

Parking space? In the old days they built Seaborg a stairway up to LBL, so I heard.

madrox4• 4 years ago

As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure.

Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.

I can see how this might equate to having the "wrong experience." I hope candidates who wait to apply for that big dream job (or don't get it) at least are taking jobs that prepare them for it. Barring that, I hope they're finding other ways to gain experience. We can't always choose the jobs we want, but I hope everyone is figuring out how to build towards it.

heavenlyblue2• 4 years ago

"I work for the highest bidder"

Uhm, I find people like these are actually the easiest to keep. They know their price and define it. You know what to expect.

strgcmc• 4 years ago

There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not).

We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.

mbg7212• 4 years ago

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.

r3012• 4 years ago

How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?

I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

eastbound3• 4 years ago

I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers…

You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.

baobabKoodaa• 4 years ago

Can you disclose which company you work for / what your company does?

richiebful1• 4 years ago

Most companies forget how expensive hiring, onboarding and training is. And how rare finding an amazing employee is.

Great on you for rewarding him generously for his performance!

germinalphrase6• 4 years ago

For what role did you hire that person?

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates.

Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.

Strongly agree with this point.

calderwoodra• 4 years ago

Maybe this is part of why I got my first job - told my interviewer my plan was to become the CEO

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person.

Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with significant programming/math or other such experience.

I do a lot of mentoring of college grads. If anyone shows an interest in Big Tech I always encourage them to apply and help them get the process started. However, it is not my experience that 50% of your average (or even above average as mentoring programs tend to select for the more ambitious) CS grads are walking into something like a Big Tech ML job with no relevant experience.

Always apply if you’re curious. If nothing else, you will learn the interview process and see where you need to improve for next time. However, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the dream job right away. Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.

honkdaddy2• 4 years ago

Well said as usual, PragP.

My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, what more often happens is that the ruts they got into from their previous job start to show and it affects their interview performance.

fnbr• 4 years ago

What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.

moeris• 4 years ago

he cites a statistic that 50%...

Not a statistic so much as an anecdote. He makes it pretty explicit, I thought.

ketzo• 4 years ago

Eh, even if it’s an anecdote, it comes off as actionable advice: “make sure you apply to Google/Amazon/Facebook as your safety jobs, since you’ve got a 50% chance of getting in there anyway.”

Which feels… optimistic.

foobiekr3• 4 years ago

The ML thing would not surprise me at all. ML is so hot that if you know the buzzwords and have done some hello world project, someone will give you a job. It is very much like "html coding" in 1999 and will probably have the same outcome.

SamvitJ• 4 years ago

Hard disagree. ML is hard to break into, even with strong credentials. (Source: ML engineer)

orzig• 4 years ago

My company gets an absolute a glut of applicants who did a Boot Camp or even Masters program into science, and rejects most before interviewing. We’re not Google either, in pay or prestige. So I’ll strongly object to your characterization based on extensive anecdotal evidence.

hinkley• 4 years ago

Honestly, with no experience how would you even know what your dream job was? I had some clue how good I had it, but that was at a philosophical level ("I'm very fortunate to be here blah blah blah.") Once "it" was taken away, I started to understand at a more visceral level. And yet there are aspects that I only managed to unpack last year, which makes me wonder what I'll notice next year.

jt2190• 4 years ago

Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.

But the assertion here is that too many “pivoting up” jobs are a negative indicator. (An “upper class” programmer wouldn’t spend time in the “lower” classes.)

Not saying I agree or disagree with this, but the existence of a class system in tech jobs is the OP’s central point.

Edit: The OP says it clearly:

In many ways, having no experience is better than having the wrong experience because people don't unfairly prejudge you for having the wrong experience.

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1551665467864977408?s=21&t...

majormajor• 4 years ago

As advice for hiring managers this twitter thread is very actionable: stop judging people harshly for working their way up.

As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system is already in play before even your first job.

What colleges do you think fancy tech employers hang out at and recruit at? What internships do you think are going to get your resume past their initial screen? Things like "Microsoft stack, not relevant" and "low profile school" are already a problem for many.

(The broader problem with wanting to work at TrendyCo is that by definition so does everyone else so they're going to be drowning in applications and have to resort to some stupid/arbitrary process to filter things down.)

EdwardDiego4• 4 years ago

"Wrong kind of experience is worse than no experience" is an interesting concept.

It implies that the people thinking like this think that people aren't mutable. With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.

Which may be true for some people, but I'm fairly certain that humans are known for their adaptability, their willingness to learn.

At least that's why they get more skill points per level in D&D.

ransom15384• 4 years ago

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ability to say "no". This could be toxic. Fresh grads just take orders and start doing what the culture wants. Sure, there is a few spots for extremely specific niches - eg. you wrote podman, and they need to convert to podman yesterday. The only real hope, if you aren't a fresh faced grad is to get acquired - for some reason you get a pass from all interview hazing and drama [tons of friends in this group]. FAANGSs will also take in anyone from another FAANG at any stage in the career (nothing gives them sweeter pleasure than harming another FAANG).

Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.

projectazorian• 4 years ago

Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that

No, that’s not what that means.

Random_BSD_Geek• 4 years ago

This was an uncannily accurate characterization of my time at one of these companies.

tfehring2• 4 years ago

I think it's useful to distinguish the behavior of FAANG [0] as a collective vs. any individual FAANG company. FAANG as a collective almost exclusively hires recent college grads, who work there until retirement [1]. Any individual FAANG company is constantly hiring senior devs, who work there for ~2 years before going to a different individual FAANG company for a pay raise (or for various other reasons). Some FAANGs (or at least some teams) are meat grinders, but my impression is that that's pretty far from the norm.

[0] Meaning those 5 specific companies + other large tech companies that compete with them for talent + startups comprised of people from those companies.

[1] Leaving in your thirties to become a carpenter or open a restaurant or whatever still counts as retirement if you have enough in the bank to never have to work again.

mathgladiator3• 4 years ago

FANGS hire plenty of senior talent especially on the infrastructure side, but there is a core challenge of what ever senior means.

I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.

dan-robertson• 4 years ago

Doesn’t Netflix only hire people senior engineers though? Perhaps you’d disagree about the definition of senior.

It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture.

It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work.

If the median(?) age at Google is 29, isn’t that a combination of (a) growing a lot and (b) hiring a lot of new grads? Then it’s mostly a function of the average % of the size of the company you hire each year at 22 years old.

throwaway6734• 4 years ago

This isn't my experience. Multiple people that I used to work with at a no name company now work at Amazon Google and meta.

I've gotten offers to onsite at Google and other big tech cos but didn't follow through due to not wanting to grind LC

These places seem to be hiring like crazy.

germinalphrase6• 4 years ago

Transitioning out of a career in HS education and seeking a path in PM. Looking for useful prep references and remote referrals if anyone is willing to extend a hand.

natpalmer17763• 4 years ago

Every PM I have met pivoted from a technical or front line role. External hires for PMs without direct prior experience are probably lottery-esque happenings.

tbran• 4 years ago

This website [0] might be helpful. Guy says he went from being a kindergarten teacher to a marketer at Apple. The website is meant to sell his courses. I bet there is some useful info, and at the least it should be a confidence boost that it's possible.

[0] https://www.breakinto.tech/blog/2015/10/14/how-i-went-from-t...

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

In other words, Dan Luu has the wrong experience to teach us anything about tech hiring in general.

homie• 4 years ago

is there any way out if you find yourself stuck with a couple years of wrong experience?

svnt2• 4 years ago

Get another degree (one year masters) and then reapply as NCG, or just delete exp from your resume and see if you can pass as NCG.

tfehring2• 4 years ago

I went from a life insurance company in the Midwest to a pretty desirable tech company in the last few years. This tweet [0] from patio11 (linked from the posted tweet) basically sums up my path:

If you’re early career, try to get into a high-status engineering employer or consider a status arbitrage like e.g. a stint at one of the many startups which are known to recruiters but can’t match Google offers and so feel perpetually understaffed.

I went to a YC-funded startup. It wasn't a well-known startup by any means, and there were fewer than 30 employees when I left. I don't think anyone there was ex-FAANG, and they didn't pay at anywhere near FAANG levels. But startup employees are in the talent pool for big tech companies in a way that insurance company employees generally are not.

Anyway, when I had been at the startup for a year, I cold applied for my current position on my current employer's website, and here I am. Zero chance I would have gotten a callback if I'd applied directly from the insurance company, even though I would still have been able to do my current job effectively if I'd never gone to the startup.

[0] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1379852979868631041

I_complete_me• 4 years ago

A personal anecdote that gives some credence to this theory:

Some years ago, after the Economic Crash of 2009, I attended a course in Progammable Logic Controllers which was designed to be a module for electrician's Continuing Professional Development. I, a Civil Engineer, had no background in this topic and said as much to the tutor. "Don't worry, he said, "the people with no experience nearly always do better than anyone else". This surprised me. It also surprised me when I came joint top in the course results.

heavenlyblue2• 4 years ago

People with experience can’t be asked doing the course because they know better anyway :) of course you do better because you probably take it seriously

shmde• 4 years ago

I can tell you this is 110% true in my case. I graduated and landed a very shitty testing job at a big consulting firm. I worked hard like a mule( more like a donkey ) for 11 months.

Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job. I resigned the next month.

Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).

Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top. Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.

I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.

AyyWS• 4 years ago

That same experience will be a boon later. You can show your progression from QA > Dev > Whatever you want. It's no longer an anchor weighing you down, it's a Rocky Balboa underdog story.

cxr3• 4 years ago

your progression from QA > Dev

Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.

A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:

The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.

<https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jamal-greene/>

glthr• 4 years ago

I have the same personal experience.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

I've been involved in screening candidates where we basically did just put aside applications from people whose commercial experience was not exactly what the JD was asking for, and indeed some were those with a background in testing/QA when we specifically needed a developer. But that's because we had a ton of resumes sent through by recruiters where it seemed like they'd done very little to ensure they were sending us relevant candidates. To be fair we would have put your resume aside if you'd removed your QA experience too if you didn't also have significant commercial experience as a developer.

But in general if I was responsible for the final call on a junior hire I'd definitely prefer someone with industry experience even in a different role over someone with none at all.

JacobThreeThree• 4 years ago

QA gets looked down on for sure. Only put your QA experience for a job with QA in the title.

Ironically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, finding good QA people, and people who want to do QA, is difficult.

Has anyone else experienced QA stigma?

foobiekr3• 4 years ago

Congratulations.

Honestly, I have always felt really bad about hiring someone into a QA role. It is almost always a trap and I try to discourage people from going down that path for exactly the reasons you describe.

I am glad you've gotten past it. Excellent. Good luck to you.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

The one thing you do learn when in a job that gives you "wrong experience" is that you're in the "wrong job" for what the "right job" would be in the future.

I think you have to be in a "wrong job" before you can understand what a "right job" is.

I do not agree with the premise though as it's assuming that people cannot discern the difference. It's akin to talking about knowledge vs. wisdom and the typical explanation of fruits and vegetables. It makes little sense in this context as people are much smarter than given credit.

mlcrypto• 4 years ago

Some people are luckier than others

darth_avocado• 4 years ago

It is definitely true for the most part. I took a software engineering job in A software firm that’s considered on of the OG Silicon Valley company after I graduated. Unfortunately, I very quickly realized that whenever I applied to FAANG or other “SV cool kids” companies, I would not get an opportunity, meanwhile, new grads from my same Uni kept getting those jobs. You don’t get interviews because you work at a non glamorous company, but you work at a non glamorous company because you don’t get interviews. It’s a tough cycle that takes some serious work to get out of.

A thing that may be at play here is that you add “years of experience” on your resume, and therefore as a lateral hire, are expected to get paid more and therefore the risk aversion.

Another thing at play could be the recency of experience. Your most recent item on the resume is what catches the most attention, so if it is something like SWE at Walgreens vs Senior at MIT, the latter sounds more promising (even if it’s not true).

TLDR; there are consequences of not starting at the right company, because they compound over time.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

What should a new grad do to avoid starting at the wrong company? Stay unemployed?

foobiekr3• 4 years ago

Find a job at a company before graduation.

But basically, go somewhere that isn't a black mark on your resume. I mean, there are obvious companies like Veritas, IBM, Symantec, Oracle, Cisco, HP (not Aruba), PornHub, ... which should be avoided because they have, for good or for bad, poor reputations for the junior candidates coming out of them (senior is quite a bit better - if they still code, which you have to watch out for). Anonymous startup (not crypto) probably a better choice, plus you will learn more.

svnt2• 4 years ago

In my experience, very high-performing teams are not rare outside of prestige employers, but the distribution is longer-tailed.

Employees at prestige employers don’t want to consider that they might not be the best, or might not have to put up with all the corporate bureaucracy, so they erect barriers.

For recruiters, recommending prestige resumes is just the equivalent of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

Nobody on tech teams is putting in 20 hour weeks and watercoolering to get by in those small teams at small companies. Everything they do counts.

eastbound3• 4 years ago

Cue a random example: 2-people company bought for millions by Atlassian or 18-people company bought for billions by Facebook (Wasn’t Whatsapp 18 people?).

zwieback• 4 years ago

ML is maybe a good example of a hot field that's sucking up the best as well as upper middle performing developers only to later spit them out when the meltdown comes. That in itself may not be a problem if you get your foot in the door of a company you're happy at. On the other hand, if you're just hanging on it might be sobering to have to switch from Google to a smaller company in a more affordable region.

bena2• 4 years ago

I think I've felt this a little bit.

As a non-degreed individual, I didn't hear anything from places I would apply. Eventually, I applied for a non-development job at a company that also claimed it developed software. With the hopes I'd be able to kind of prove my chops while in the other role to get moved over.

Luckily, the company I applied for had no fucking clue what they were doing and hired me for a software development position because their entire technology team had just quit like a week ago or something. And while that job essentially started me on my path to where I am now, and I don't consider myself incompetent. They honestly had absolutely no clue on how to evaluate technology credentials.

My resume was my incomplete education, my work in retail, and a bit of the hobbyist development I had done on the Dreamcast.

Now, the job turned out to be an entire shit-show. This was a company who claimed to develop software but didn't have a license for Visual Studio. No one knew how to manage a SQL Server. Etc. They were looking for a glorified help desk technician who could write some config file level stuff for the software package they were a reseller for.

However. They did contract the bulk of their networking to another company. And also contracted with the owner to be the effective CTO or something. Eventually, that guy knew I wasn't happy or challenged at the job. And when he heard I was looking, he just offered me a job. So I became a contractor for him.

Eventually, one of our clients had their developer just walk in the middle of a project and they needed me there like every day to salvage the situation. After a while, they realized it would be more cost effective to just essentially buy me. So now I work for them, and I have for the past 6 or 7 years. Timeline is a little fuzzy. This client is major. You've heard of them. Now, I get recruiters contacting me and solicitations in my email even though I haven't actively looked for a job since 2007. Even though the place I work for is not even a technology company.

Names do matter.

kingrazor• 4 years ago

I also had no degree and wound up working for a small software company as an IT "intern" which quickly lead to being their sole IT person. That company was also a complete shit-show, but had I not worked there I wouldn't have gained the skills that lead to my current role, which is the best job I've had yet.

bena2• 4 years ago

Sadly, I can't even really credit that first job with any skills.

Maybe familiarity with SQL Server Management Studio.

The only thing it allowed me to do was to shift so I would develop projects on the company dime rather than at home. If I wanted to learn python, I'd write some web services in python for my job rather than for some bullshit at home.

thaumaturgy• 4 years ago

I'm experiencing this now and it's taking some energy to not become disillusioned with the industry.

Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists. For any given technology or stack right now, some company out there is doing something cool with it, and they only want to hire people who are already familiar with their particular configuration. The couple of tech interviews I've had so far have really obviously been looking for me to keyword or namedrop some experience with whatever it is that they're using already. There have even been positions where I had like 95% of the desired experience, but that missing 5% was enough to bin me, despite having a pile of unrelated experience.

To be clear, you can make a living as a dev in the guts of a BigCo or for a consultancy or web firm, and these days it's not even a bad living (for now). But if you want to work on something closer to the cutting edge, or more stimulating, you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it.

cupofpython4• 4 years ago

you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it

I am seeing similar trends to you wrt Generalists, and this is annoying but good advice.

Even when hired, generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do. You end up being a one-stop shop for all intern and junior related work, with the added bonus of being invited to a lot of meetings and not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence in those meetings.

I've settled on the belief that general knowledge is something you do for yourself, and to help set you apart from other specialists. It doesn't pay you directly. I've got almost a decade of general business and analytics knowledge, and always seems to stall out on the climb in ways you describe (not dropping the right software name brand). Time to make a bet

em-bee2• 4 years ago

generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do

someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude.

not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence

i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid?

and if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me.

halfmatthalfcat4• 4 years ago

Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists

I actually disagree with this. Speaking anecdotally but also someone who works at a FAANG-esque co, full stack or “wide stack” (front, back, infra, sre) are the most desirable due to their versatility and knowledge of the interworkings of various parts of the stack.

kristopolous3• 4 years ago

Someone needs to tell HR then. That is in no way what they are looking for.

jacksnipe• 4 years ago

Hmm this has not been my personal experience (as a highly generalist dev), but maybe I’m just lucky. If anything, my extremely broad lens has led to some really great systems design rounds, and I always crush the behavioral.

opportune2• 4 years ago

This doesn’t match my experience at all. A lot of companies at the cutting edge know that nobody is ramped up on their area and aren’t trying to limit themselves to only poaching from competitors. In particular at big tech your previous scope and projects (like launching features, leading a feature or infrastructure team, shipping an entire product) are so much more important than eg your background in advertising - a background in advertising may be a plus for an advertising team, especially if you’re getting hired at a very high level (8+), but not a requirement or even target for recruiting purposes.

I know HN loves to hate on big tech but a lot of the cutting edge is there. IME startups and “less selective” companies are more focused on getting people with very specific experience because they can’t afford to train someone up or risk them being a bad fit - and while startups almost by definition are doing something different than incumbents, that doesn’t mean they’re the whole cutting edge. Or, they are old-school and bin everyone as a “Java spring boot dev” either because HR doesn’t understand what things are easy to learn and what are hard, or engineering buckets themselves into these fixed categories and has a kind of “my turf”/static mindset with no expectation to learn or work on new things.

firebaze• 4 years ago

How do you come to this conclusion? Sincere question. I'm not posting personal anecdotes to support or disprove your argument, I have an opinion, and it may or may not overlap with yours.

postalrat2• 4 years ago

Are you speak from experience or repeating something you read on hn or reddit?

jmcgough• 4 years ago

As a counterpoint, having a broad range of skills and experiences has been hugely important for me and my employer, and hasn't limited my career or compensation. I fill in the gaps where I'm needed, and it's up to me to create visibility and take on projects that look good on my resume. Naturally I tend to go deep wherever I end up at a startup (so I have specialized experienced that helps my career), and my breadth allows me understand the entirety of the stack and design systems better than someone who only knows one part of the stack.

At startups you really want someone who can jump into any part of the technical work and ship quickly.

decafninja3• 4 years ago

My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords or "N years of X". The Silicon Valley tech companies mostly don't seem to care about this.

Actually, the SV tech companies do want a particular kind of specialist - Leetcode Masters.

As long as you can regurgitate algorithms while putting on a show as if you discovered the solution serendipitously at the whiteboard, you're golden regardless of whether you have 20 years of experience in Rust or whether your previous job was serving tables as a waiter.

In fact, going along with the theme of this original article, some tech companies have a pipeline for "nontraditional applicants", so I feel in some sense, it can actually be advantageous to be a former waiter whose spent time mastering leetcode vs. an industry veteran with many years of experience at the "wrong companies".

bastardoperator• 4 years ago

This is how Disney tends to or used to operate its theme parks. If you're coming from another theme park chances are you have been trained incorrectly meaning a person with no experience has the advantage. Not saying I agree or disagree, but I can understand why someone could think otherwise.

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

I can see this happening, having worked with former Disney people (back office finance type stuff). Almost every day, "well at Disney we did it this way..." even years removed from there. Granted, sometimes the Disney Way was better! But other times I'd have to say, "that's not a bad idea, but unfortunately we don't yet have the resources or reputation of Disney to make a similar tactic work for this project."

avgDev3• 4 years ago

I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.

I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers.

I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta.

I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a business, and all the mistakes you have made.

This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong". There are many ways to be successful and this POV is toxic imo.

Edit: I would love to hear what the wrong experience is.

halfmatthalfcat4• 4 years ago

Just a side note: FAANG recruiters/startups spam pretty much any developer with buzzwords on their socials (LinkedIn/GH/etc). That’s not necessarily a signal you’re hirable at those companies.

avgDev3• 4 years ago

It is a signal you can get an interview.

felideon• 4 years ago

Have never worked for FAANG/MAGMA, but the theory is that if you have `n` years of, say, MUMPS experience at an insurance company, the next candidate with `y` years of Python experience will have a better chance of getting hired---even if `y=0`.

More realistically, you (arguably) have a better chance of getting hired with 3 years of Python exp at a ML startup or whatever, than with 10 years of exp with $unsexy_lang at $unsexy_corp.

ghaff3• 4 years ago

As I read that thread, an engineer--possibly just out of a good school--who does well on interviews is perhaps assumed to be a good hire even though they don't have much experience. (Though maybe they did an interesting project or two.)

On the other hand an engineer who took a job out of school in the IT department of some (perceived) boring stodgy company even if they really aren't (Walmart was mentioned) obviously has something wrong with them in the eyes of some even if it's not obvious what exactly. Better to pass and go for the right new grad who is probably a bit cheaper as well.

pedrosorio• 4 years ago

Walmart was mentioned

I believe you mean Walgreens (in patio11's original thread).

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

The engineer who already has a job at a random company has a known skill level and growth trajectory. The engineer out of a good school has an unknown growth trajectory. Conditioned on the accomplishments of alumni at the school and the (subjective) acceptance bar of the school, the new grad engineer could have a much steeper growth trajectory than the established one.

Silicon Valley got this right on the money ironically [1]. If you have nothing to show, people assume a potential future ability level rather than basing their decisions on your actual ability.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

civilized• 4 years ago

This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong"

He's saying that some people will judge you for working in less prestigious places. He's explicitly condemning that but saying it still happens.

badrabbit2• 4 years ago

People who agree with the post also say things like "i don't hire people with certs" in IT. Which is a load of bull of course. They want to teach you their own way and disregard industry practices because they are the best.

What I have learned is this also means they don't want someone who will disrupt or question the status quo.

In infosec for example, I work or worked at a place with a lot of really smart people but they have been at the same company long and the idea of doing things in a layered defense strategy (not perimeter/firewall/ids centric) way is "the wrong way" to them even though that is best practice now. On the other end I keep running into people that have worked at startups like uber for a long time and their answer to threats is "use only macs" or "get everyone a yubikey". No shit? Lol

You can't be experienced and not have some bad experience but managers and people in power disregarding experienced people's opinion's without applying critical thinking is laziness and incompetence.

You need experienced people as well as people with little experience but who are motivated to learn on any good team. It's like a sports team lineup, you don't want everyone having the same skill and experience you want them to have what is right for the position they are playing.

PainfullyNormal• 4 years ago

I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.

If you don't mind me asking, how did you come across this sort of a job? I don't suppose there's a job board for non-tech companies looking to hire a solo full stack dev? :)

avgDev3• 4 years ago

I met an older guy in a CS class. We did a project together and became school buddies. Before graduating I wanted to intern somewhere where I would get a lot of freedom. He was high up in a business and decided to offer me an internship.

I did a couple small projects to solve problems they were having. They were successful. I'm now pretty important to the business. I know databases of the ERP system, I have a lot of trust and basically am above the HR and have complete freedom.

When I interview no company is willing to offer the flexibility they do. So, honestly I'm not even sure how one would go about finding a gig like this.

wulke• 4 years ago

This was also true in the military:

At basic training, our drill instructors often said that recruits with no experience shooting weapons were easier to train than other recruits who had experience because it was much easier to teach best practices to someone who was a "blank slate" than it was to retrain best practices to someone who learned improper methods.

I haven't exactly seen this idea like-for-like in the "corporate" world, but I believe the general premise is accurate.

cxr3• 4 years ago

This is a good analogy but inadequate. What Dan is saying goes beyond that. In the scenario you're describing, it is rational to prefer those recruits—for exactly those reasons. The behavior that Dan describes involves a heap of irrationality.

Dan's piece that he linked (about "Mike") really is important to understand the thing that he's referring to.

<http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/>

(Kudos on being able to yes-and the post, though. Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.)

anonymoushn2• 4 years ago

Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.

I've found this comment section to be a bit shocking, to be honest. I thought a message like "Trendy hiring managers will discriminate against you if you work for Walgreens or a bank or use a Microsoft stack, compared to if you have no professional experience" would be simple enough to be successfully transmitted to readers.

antonymy2• 4 years ago

I think it's also about the "culture fit" that these high prestige tech companies look for. Young people fresh out of school will not have been "tainted" by the workplace culture of other companies. Moreover, young people in general, but especially those still in the highly social school mindset, tend to be influenced by peers more easily than adults, especially jaded adults. This all makes young people fresh out of school much more easily molded to the company culture.

beebeepka• 4 years ago

My current employer is investing heavily into - I wouldn't say hordes, but they are many - juniors because "culture" sculpting Devs for our specific needs.

Or at least that's the official story. While these reasons may be real, I think it boils down to money and loyalty. Can't blame them but yeah, makes me feel a bit uneasy

antonymy2• 4 years ago

Yes, naivete is the the other issue besides culture. People without work experience, especially tech work experience, won't push back as hard or negotiate as effectively with their management, which translates to lower salary and a willingness to go along with what the company wants. I don't want to paint young folks with too broad a brush though, I've met some young coworkers that were pretty savvy, it's just in general what I have seen.

d--b• 4 years ago

When I tried to get my first programming job, I got zero responses from major software companies.
I accidentally did the right thing when I took a hardware job I was referred into at Google, because having a prestigious company on my resume was the right programmer class marker.

Yeah... Not everyone gets referred into Google.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

Yes, it's called ageism. Young and fresh is perceived as better than experienced because some bozo will make the argument that they've been doing software engineering "wrong".

ChrisPebble2• 4 years ago

This is definitely true sometimes, but the “wrong” kind of experience can definitely hamper people.

I have a highly skilled senior developer with a desktop app development background who joined our web team, he’s excellent at many tasks but keeps getting tripped up when dealing with state. He logically knows how it works, but his muscle memory when programming is so used to being able to rely on state that it’s hard for him stop letting those concepts leak in and trip him up.

He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.

crispyambulance• 4 years ago

He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.

OK, but how much could it possibly "hamper" him if he's still an "amazing asset"? Is it a permanent condition? Or is it just something that you noticed once or twice and made a mental note of?

We all have gaps and shortcomings. Overcoming them is a matter of practice, but if someone is second-guessing and judging every brain-fart, that's not good for anyone.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

Lol, it's web development it's not rocket science. He doesn't need to wait for the next reincarnation cycle before he can be made fresh again to learn Redux.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

State management is also a thorn for desktop apps that need to talk to a server. Or even desktop apps that need to use a local data store, and whose UI has effects not stored when saving. E.g. this is why the MVVM pattern exists in WPF (the last desktop platform I worked on). And things like Reactive Extensions.

JS/React in some sense is just using a high level desktop development language, fetch is rpc, and the server is ... the server.

postalrat2• 4 years ago

Probably because what you call state he calls globals.

lmm2• 4 years ago

if anything the ageism goes in the other direction IMO - "experienced" commands a salary premium even when their actual skill and useful experience is no better than a fresh grad.

mhotchen• 4 years ago

Referring to the title I think this is exceedingly the exception, not the norm (excluding bad hiring policies). Learning what not to do is more valuable than starting with a clean slate

Referring to the twitter post, I agree. No point wasting time if a better opportunity already presents itself

bob1029• 4 years ago

This is something that I have always suspected at some level.

I think wrong experience isn't bad as long as you are willing to be convinced otherwise. For me, the pain kicks in when someone with the wrong experience is not open to alternatives.

Unfortunately, the true willingness of a candidate to entertain alternatives is not something you discover until many weeks/months into the real deal.

As a consequence, resumes with very little technical matter in them have been appealing to me far more than those loaded up with framework-of-the-week and "best practices" word salads.

soneca• 4 years ago

Is this advice only to be hired by FAANG-like companies? It seems so.

tester756• 4 years ago

Just skew the odds

lazyant• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

I believe this has to do with the perception and signaling of potential.

Potential, when unrealized, contains more parts unknown than the known. You can measure some things - like GPA, school ranking, standardized test results, and so on.

If/when you do get employed, then that also becomes a new measure - and to some degree, lays the foundation for other speculation.

Put this way: If someone opts to work for a "C" level company, does this change the expected value of that candidate? If the candidate is "A" level, why would they join a "C" level company? The simplest answer for an observer, would probably be that they are simply not "A" level material, and probably closer to where they've been.

IMO - that's flawed thinking, as there are tons of variables, but it seems to be how many think. It's like with sports - often times top clubs will get top talent.

But yeah, back to the perception. Now you have a new datapoint - which could could drag you down - while your competitors still have the benefit of less information. These candidates can leverage their potential more, simply because the people hiring know less about them, and will have to take a larger chance / risk on hiring them. But as long as their other measures are ok, that might be worth it.

xivzgrev• 4 years ago

Imagine you are building a weight lifting team. You want strong people who are willing to work hard.

Someone from the US Olympic marathon team applies! Wow! This guy is really good athlete. But..clearly his experience is with long distance running, not short intense bursts. He likely won’t be a good fit.

Same thing with companies, just more nuanced.

pdpi• 4 years ago

The marathon runner’s experience is so different from what’s expected from a weight lifter, the two things won’t interfere.

My favourite example of this is performers with a background in dancing who then go on to do martial arts scenes in films. It’s many of the same movements, and being a dancer gets you a large part of the way there for choreographed fight scenes, but then you get to the details, and they’ve spent so much time training to move with a certain softness and gracefulness that the snappier, more explosive movement in martial arts becomes incredibly difficult for them. This is especially obvious with kicks, both in terms of leg movement and foot posture.

rajin444• 4 years ago

It’s fairly well known among elite lifters that if elite athletes (NFL, etc) ever changed to lifting they’d likely dominate the sport.

What matters is the money. Same goes for programming.

nearmuse• 4 years ago

I am kind of living by this; I really don't see how a "menial" job experience transfers onto "exciting" jobs. If you want to do ML or program computer graphics, 5 years of writing CRUD code in Python will probably not do wonders for you. Unless of course before that you had scarce programming experience, and even then I don't see why would you need to sit all of those 5 years out. Seems like this kind of advice boils down to "dress for the job you want...".

borroka2• 4 years ago

An anchoring effect is at play. Professionals, and people more in general, are defined by what they have done so far, especially after becoming full-fledged adults. The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today.

Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we see the paths of others.

Interestingly, baseball is the only sport in which the ordinary athlete, not the exception represented by the 20-year-old Dominican superstar, has to go from the minors to MLB. In all other sports, there is no adult developmental league to speak of. Sure, players transition from lower to higher level teams all the time, but those teams, apart from the usual exceptions, fly around in the same rarefied atmosphere of excellence.

For those who haven't done anything yet there is a "maybe, who knows" penciled next to the box, but for those who have done poorly there is a big "on to the next" written next to it.

ZephyrBlu• 4 years ago

The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today

Is it? Or do we make it that way.

borroka2• 4 years ago

I lean toward "is," on average.

The assumption is that large course deviations are unlikely and not sudden. It's like air temperature: the best predictor of tomorrow's temperature, without knowing much or anything else, is today's temperature. A person in a strong relationship today is more likely to be in a relationship a month from now than someone in a "weaker" relationship today. You might say, "Well, that's obvious," but it's a similar lens to the one we use to look at other people's professional lives, which is that, by and large, people are more likely to be in the future what they have been for five years than what you think their potential might be.

As someone who worked in academia before moving to the technology sector, the main concern I found with hiring managers was that I would be "too academic." You may think these labels are meaningless: everyone can change and adapt quickly to new realities or to their jobs. But there is a certain mindset that undoubtedly can remain for quite some time, when not forever.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

It is true maybe. As a 20yoe software engineer, I could get a pay raise by taking a graduate role at Google.

grog454• 4 years ago

Having the wrong experience can also be better than no experience. My early career was full of what I call "negative learning" experiences. I was essentially taught what not to do with clear demonstrations of why it shouldn't be done. Eventually it became apparent that every job, every experience even has lessons you can learn from, whether they be positive or negative reinforcements. This open minded approach where I strive to be as objective as possible made working as a solo dev for 7+ years a successful and not particularly scary endeavour.

badrabbit2• 4 years ago

If you are teachable and motivated only. Otherwise not so much

WWLink• 4 years ago

lmao whoever wrote that sounds pretty far up their own ass.

ouid• 4 years ago

Practice makes permanent.

habosa• 4 years ago

Yes this is true and unfortunate but what is the relevant advice for hiring managers here? Ignore resumes altogether?

I worked at a FAANG company for a long time and now work at a startup. In general I have no desire to replicate their hiring but I would still consider the FAANG engineer resume line as a very strong positive signal.

I’m not trying to be elitist. I know that the best engineers I’ve ever met would not be recognizable by a simple resume screen. But even at a startup we get hundreds of resumes per open position, we do need some filtering criteria.

In general every HN discussion around hiring seems to go in the same circle. Absolutely nobody is happy with the status quo but also nobody has a working solution they can share that’s not riddled with personal biases.

fishtockos• 4 years ago

Any advice on up-leveling here? I'm a generalist backend dev that's bounced around startups for a while and am now pushing 40 and have been thinking about how to specialize before it's too late

kristopolous3• 4 years ago

Find something you're passionate about

It's hard to work just for money, that's usually not where love lies

XCSme• 4 years ago

Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

One case this is true is when learning a physical skill, for example, playing table tennis. If you already have a specific habit of hitting the ball, changing it to use a correct stroke is vastly harder than simply learning it from scratch. Overwriting brain paths is harder than making new ones.

decafninja3• 4 years ago

Most of my career has been at investment banks.

My first attempt at a trendy Silicon Valley tech company was at one of the FAANGs where my friend had previously gotten in and referred me. I was told that I was going to have to do a homework project because my bank * background.

I've applied to several other companies where I was told outright I was not being considered because of my bank background, or that the odds were against me because of my bank background. One company had me write an essay justifying why I would be a good hire in spite of my bank background. Ironically, one was a company that used .NET as their primary stack - .NET being the darling of banks and other big crufty old school enterprises and often shunned by other trendy tech companies.

Speaking of .NET - most of my early career experience was as a .NET developer. That too opened up a whole bunch of discrimination so that I removed any mention of .NET or C# in my resume and LinkedIn once I decided I no longer wanted to work for banks or other old school companies. Being able to pivot to Python and JavaScript opened doors.

Having said that, having a bank background is not a showstopper to getting a job at a Silicon Valley tech company. I've managed to make the jump, and many of my ex-colleagues from banks have also made the jump. The biggest hurdle seems to be whether you want to put in the time to grind leetcode or not.

* "bank" here could probably be interchanged with most crufty old school tech-as-a-cost-center enterprises in general.

Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

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