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.
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.
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).
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…).
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 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.
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).