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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
