Let challenge this meme: Is experience really overrated?

[Crowbar of Irony +3]

So I have been reading some self-help books (yes, I willingly admit that I got issues; and after reading a dozen I conclude they are all saying the same things in different ways, and only a few are worth the price). One meme that I keep coming across is "experience is overrated". Then the author will go on to cite examples on how IBM was blindsided by Bill Gates and etc.

I used to think that way too, till I come into contact with some of my friends who have been working in the industry for a while. I realise that experience is indeed important. But at the same time, it's not just any 'experience', but those that impart "wisdom".

Once I was at an internship for a team that was doing a fancy 3d walkthrough when the client was complaining, "It doesn't look 3D enough!" None on the team, who are mostly engineers but not visual designers, have an idea what to do with that complaint. I brought this incident up with a friend who was the assistant art director in a design studio, and he said, "I know what the client means. Basically, the scene does not have enough depth, perhaps due to lighting, placement of objects or or the use of texture"

Experience won that round.

Is experience really overrated? Underrated? What do you think?

[DianaG]

Experience is not overrated. What is potentially overrated is people with experience. Having done something before doesn't necessarily mean that one did it well, or learned much from it.

[Xema]

Depends on the experience and the person.

10,000 hours as pilot of an airplane ranks as highly experienced. I recall an incident where such a pilot had shown bad judgment. One comment was "Does he have 10,000 hours, or is it 100 hours, a hundred times over?"

As DianaG notes, the extent to which people learn and benefit from their experience varies a lot.

[constanze]

I think it's similar to age: simply being old doesn't make you wise, it can also mean you're set in your ways and thus dumb.

Experience is overrated if people look down on theory or planning ahead. Just because you always did it this way = experience, doesn't mean it's the best way, or the most efficient, or that technology has marched on.

Throwing experience away in favour of theory = dumb
Putting experience over theory = dumb
Learning wisdom from experience, and integrating it with theory and planning and multiple experts = smart.

The example you cite, of IBM, was one where experience had become a rut, preventing people from seeing new and different ways. If you build a house the same way for hundreds of years, these houses are generally well-adapted to the current climate; so if you transplant them elsewhere, the experience is useless. Also, advantages in technology means you can improve the energy efficiency of old styles with new materials.
Building machines or cars, fuel economy and similar was at the beginning not a consideration, so when conditions started to change, experience was a hindrance.

It seems experience is bad whenever it develops into an automatic habit.

On the other hand, Xema has a good point about pilots - you put them in absurd, impossible situations in simulators for the purpose of making their reactions to real crises partly automatic. They know they can handle not only fair-weather, but also flying blind, landing with half the systems broken and other awful situations. They have trained until they know how to level the plane under almost all weather and pressure combinations.
Or a smith or machine builder: they have 20 years experience of how to work and treat the metal to get what they want. So in the day-to-day job, or when reflexes are called for, experience is good and necessary. Only not for long-term planning.

[Public Animal No. 9]

On my first post-college job, I once heard a coworker say of another, "He doesn't have ten years experience - he has one year of experience ten times." I've always remembered that, and I see it a lot in practice.

I think you have to have a mix of experience and cluelessness. Experience is crucial to knowing how difficult something is going to be, how people and things respond, and how to overcome those difficulties. But cluelessness is critical to doing something new. If all we did is what we've experienced, we wouldn't be much different than our long-dead ancestors.

[The Second Stone]

Experience doing it right or screwing it up? It matters. Would you have a brain surgeon with only 10 surgeries operate on you? Or one with 500? How many of those lived?

[Voyager]

Experience is very important, but it has to be the right experience.

I agree that the IBM example is a very bad one. My grad adviser put on a conference in 1978 about the '80s. The IBM people who contributed were totally mainframe centric. Adam Osborne and Portia Isaacson had a paper where they got the PC future very close to exactly right. Gates had experience in the small computer world by the time IBM came to him, and he only "beat" IBM after Microsoft was fairly large.
I think having made all the mistakes already is very useful - unless the world has changed, and everything that worked before is no longer valid. That doesn't happen all that often.

[panache45]

Young people tend to underrate experience. I have 45 years' experience in the graphic arts, and I have known young people who thought they were my peers, merely because they owned the same software. One of them was 10 years old at the time.

But I agree, it has to be experience that involves development of one's skills, not just using up time.

[manila]

ah yes, experience, the ability to recognise your mistakes when you make them again. :)

Or as the note above my desk says, "Experience - what you get when you don't get what you want."

sorry........... carry on

[Cicero]

Depending on the field, experience can also give you Corporate history. So, if a new project comes up you can/ may recall a similar option being tried before and know what the problems were.

As others have said, experience is not over rated, but it needs to be used in conjunction with other factors.

[enipla]

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Experience counts. From just about all levels. But, it can trip you up and keep you from looking at new solutions that where not previously available.

[gonzomax]

ah yes, experience, the ability to recognise your mistakes when you make them again. :)

Or as the note above my desk says, "Experience - what you get when you don't get what you want."

sorry........... carry on

The ability to say I have done that. it does not work. i am not going to do that again.

[Snnipe 70E]

Experience can be a useful tool, or it can get in your way.

I've tried that before and it did not work has left an egg on many a face. But again my experience helps me get the job done better most of the time. Sometimes when there is a problem at work I just go about getting the plant back on line being followed around by the inexperienced and the experienced who did not know what I was doing. After words I was able to explain what and why I did what I did. On some the light goes on on others all I can see is confusion.

I like working with an apprentice that will ask my why and what are you doing. And there have been times when they will ask why I did not do it a different way. And when they explain their way and if they are right I have gained some more experience and knowledge.

Experience is like knowledge. Knowlegdge is having the information, wisdom is the application of knowledge. Some very smart people have no wisdom.

[ParentalAdvisory]

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Can anyone clarify the meaning of this statement? I think I know what it means, but would like a definition. Lots of hits on Google, but mostly just the statement used by others with no clear meaning.

[Rysto]

Can anyone clarify the meaning of this statement? I think I know what it means, but would like a definition. Lots of hits on Google, but mostly just the statement used by others with no clear meaning.
It's a fancy way of saying that people learn best from making mistakes.

[ParentalAdvisory]

Thanks.

[Captain Carrot]

But I agree, it has to be experience that involves development of one's skills, not just using up time.This. Have you been doing it a while and learning how to deal with many situations, or have you been doing it a while by rote?

[astorian]

Experience CAN be extremely valuable, but it also gets too much credit, sometimes.

Perfect example: look at this year's NBA playoffs. I've heard numerous commentators saying the Lakers' victories over the Magic are due to "experience." Experience, supposedly, is why Derek Fisher was able to hit a key last-second basket... never mind that Fisher had played poorly the entire game, and had missed every other 3 point shot he'd attempted!

The Magic missed numerous key free throws in game 5, which was widely blamed on inexperience... though that doesn't explain why Kobe Bryant missed so many free throws in both games 4 and 5.

I am NOT saying experience is of no value, just that it's way too easy to look at a successful person or team in retrospect and THEN decide their experience was the deciding factor.

[Gary T]

Is experience really overrated? Underrated?By whom?

Experience is overrated by some people in some situations, and underrated by some people in some situations. To say "experience is overrated" is rather meaningless without context. Tell me who's saying it and why, and then I can tell you whether or not they're right.

[Voyager]

In the field I'm in, there is about a 15 year window on papers, in that anything published before that will not be looked at by a student or anyone else new. Most of the time this is fine, because technology marches on, but once in a while I see someone repeating something done before the window, and I get to play elder statesman and give an old reference. That doesn't mean the student shouldn't work on that area, but she should at least be aware of why the proposal flopped before. (If it hadn't flopped, it will be in the culture.)

[Blake]

Experience is overrated by some people in some situations, and underrated by some people in some situations. To say "experience is overrated" is rather meaningless without context. Tell me who's saying it and why, and then I can tell you whether or not they're right.

Zigaktly.

When a self-help book says "experience is overrated" what they usually mean is that you shouldn't limit yourself because of a relative lack of experience. You shouldn't think you can't successfully compete with IBM because you lack experience. That's sound enough advice because, as they point out, many people have outcompeted those big experienced firms.


IOW the moral is that a lack of experience doesn't mean you can't succeed.

That's not the same as saying that experience is worth less than effort, intelligence, planning and a thousand other things. Success in any endeavour is most likely if you can maximise all those things. But you can still be successful if you neglect one or even several of them. You can use hard work and planning to make up for a lack of intelligence and experience for example. You'd still be better off if you worked hard and planned and were also intelligent and experienced, but the idea that experience is the single most important criterion is nonsense.

In short, if someone rates experience as being more important than hard work, intelligence, planning and so forth then they are indeed overrating experience.

[constanze]

Can anyone clarify the meaning of this statement? I think I know what it means, but would like a definition. Lots of hits on Google, but mostly just the statement used by others with no clear meaning.

I've read it in a different wording: Experience helps you to avoid mistakes. You get experience by making mistakes.

Meaning that if you start out wanting to succeed and to avoid every mistake, you will fail, because it's inevitable that you make mistakes. However, if you are able to learn from your mistakes, then you will gain experience that lets you avoid further mistakes in the future.

The hard part about learning from your mistakes is looking not at the surface - why did this go wrong? - but at the underlying cause - what mechanism made me do that, and how can I stop this mechanism? That's for life in general and negative habits rather than workshop experience; though the problem of experience vs. mistakes applies to life in general even more than just to the workshop.
And like in life, it would be smartest to learn from other people's mistakes instead of repeating them all yourself; but few humans have that amount of wisdom to recognize the mistakes you are about to make, rather you are blind in your own eye while wondering how other people don't notice the mess they are about to walk into.

[constanze]

I like working with an apprentice that will ask my why and what are you doing. And there have been times when they will ask why I did not do it a different way. And when they explain their way and if they are right I have gained some more experience and knowledge.

This is a very good example of how to seperate people who don't have experience coupled with understanding and intelligence, but only rote learning turned into automatic behaviour. I made myself outcast many times when I quite innocently asked during training "Why do we do things this way and not another way?", because I stumped the automatons who had done things this way for 30 years, and then they felt embarrassed, so they got angry with me.
But people who are smart and experienced will be able to tell you the reason behind the way. Then they can adapt their experiene with reason once things change (as they will always do).

[Gary "Wombat" Robson]

The usefulness of experience depends directly on the job.

If you're cooking burgers, then six months of experience is as good as six years. Once you have the process down, you have it.

If you're doing shipping, experience helps. You learn the ZIP codes, the best ways to route products, the shelving/storage system, customer preferences, estimating what will fit in which size boxes, what special requirements certain shippers might have, and you have the potential to just keep getting better and better.

If you're in a troubleshooting job, I don't care whether it's diagnosing lawnmower engines, fixing network problems, or repairing televisions--experience makes a HUGE difference. Recent training is good. Having the right tools is good. But neither is as important as being able to save a frustrating day of troubleshooting because you fixed a similar problem once before (or 10 times before, or...).

[msmith537]

One meme that I keep coming across is "experience is overrated". Then the author will go on to cite examples on how IBM was blindsided by Bill Gates and etc.


For some reason, people in the IT field do not value experience. I think it is because they think technology changes so rapidly that there is no point in actually learning how to do anything correctly. This, of course, leads to organizations over-promiting young "wiz kids" to positions of responsibility well before they are ready and has lead to a culture where every kid out of school thinks he should be vice president by the time he's 28.

In any organization, you need to be able to balance the lessons learned over time with new people coming in with a new perspective. IMHO, an organization consisting of automatons who have been doing the same job for 30 years is as bad or worse than one where they think everything is "new".

[CookingWithGas]

I once learned a piece of wisdom from a manager early in my career: Ten years of experience is not the same thing as getting the same one year of experience ten times.

For some reason, people in the IT field do not value experience. I think it is because they think technology changes so rapidly that there is no point in actually learning how to do anything correctly. This, of course, leads to organizations over-promiting young "wiz kids" to positions of responsibility well before they are ready and has lead to a culture where every kid out of school thinks he should be vice president by the time he's 28.

In any organization, you need to be able to balance the lessons learned over time with new people coming in with a new perspective. IMHO, an organization consisting of automatons who have been doing the same job for 30 years is as bad or worse than one where they think everything is "new".I have been in the IT industry 30 years and I value other peoples' experience more than I used to. In 1990 I was teaching object-oriented design and related programming techniques, before it had become widely accepted within the industry. And what I emphasized to everyone was, "The knowledge you have gained through your x years of experience is not obsolete! This simply builds on that!" But it required people to start thinking in a different way. It is very hard to think in a different way, harder from some than others. Some people have the mindset that you spend a few years learning a bunch of stuff then you're done and you just keep applying that for the rest of your life. In IT you have to the mindset of, "What can I learn today?" But the principles I learned 30 years ago are still valid and useful today, even though I no longer use Fortran and structure charts and data flow diagrams.

Also, managers tend to have a false economy about hiring young workers who are inexperienced but know the latest language. They can pay them less but that lack of experience catches up. This is true in many fields, but probably glaring in IT (I don't know, for example, how much is new in accounting in the last 30 years).

[T. Slothrop]

You always want the point man to be experienced.

Then the day comes when you don't have an experienced point man.

I hope on that day that you have someone who walked directly behind the point man.

We usually used a three-man point element (M-16, M-79, M-60). Most of the latter two could have taken the point man's place when he DEROSed.