Skill vs experience – a false dichotomy
Before I go on, I will preface this post by defining the discussion's scope. Here I'm talking about our industry: Tech. Some of what I say may be broadly applied to other professions, but my observations are based on the tech industry.
Sometimes people like to contrast skill and experience as two unrelated factors that affect how successfully we carry out work. In this context, the skill is usually defined as some kind of raw ability, and experience is defined as some sort of wisdom gained through the application of skill.
The false dichotomy
In the title, I said this is a false dichotomy.
I define skill differently. For me, skill is a general term for the ability to perform effectively, and is a scale from unable to very able. Far from unrelated, experience is an integral part of the ability. As one gains experience, their ability and effectiveness is enhanced.
In most cases (though not all) the more experienced developer performs better and more reliably than the less experienced one. It would be quite difficult to claim that experience does not contribute anything to the effectiveness of our performance – to our skill. On the other hand, we often see people with similar experience – at least in terms of tenure – performing wildly differently, sometimes by a factor of 10 or even 100. This may sound dramatic, but both anecdotal experience and informal studies suggest such extremes do occur, especially when effectiveness includes not just output, but problem selection, quality, and long-term impact. Therefore, the experience is not the only factor in how we perform.
Apart from experience, the factors that improve skills are knowledge, health, endurance (physical, mental), personality traits, concentration, IQ, problem domain, political pressure, the environment (e.g., comfort level, noise). The extent to which these other factors contribute to the skill is hard for me to quantify, and some of these factors shape the quality of the skill more than the quantity – I'll get to this later.
Training vs experience
A more interesting dichotomy is between training and experience – one we can actually compare directly.
Sometimes, when people say 'skill', they actually mean 'training' – that is, experience gained in a controlled or synthetic environment. These environments are designed to allow people to go through the motions of the task and build up the routines. This includes formal education, bootcamps, and some forms of on-the-job training. In contrast 'experience' in this context means the exposure to work in the context in which work is normally carried out.
So when people say 'skill vs experience', what they’re often really debating is 'training vs real-world experience'.
Therefore, sometimes, the skill vs experience debate is actually that of training vs experience.
Training is valuable – especially for beginners. It appears to be effective for conveying core principles, terminology, and mental models. Both research and anecdotal evidence, however, suggest that growth diverges widely beyond that point even among the people who receive the same training.
In our line of work specifically, training is not enough to hit the ground running in real-life scenarios.
So what do we really need to hit the ground running?
Hit the ground – get hurt
Training is usually linked to certification. This has two important ramifications that affect how well it translates to real-world growth.
The first is the need for standardization required to give certificates a well-defined meaning and, in many cases, monetize it as a product. The need to standardize leads to the loss of what I call personal reality – a set of mental models, interpretations, and responses that a professional refines over time through repeated real-life exposure.
These include meetings, disgruntled customers or managers, office politics, vague specs – and the pressure to seek out a person to clarify them – plus the time pressure, and financial strain. Though some of these may sound irrelevant, they all influence our decision-making when they are present while we work. Sometimes, the "no pain no gain" mantra is literally true – the physical or emotional discomfort becomes part of how we interpret situations and shapes how we respond the next time we encounter a similar one.
The flip side of standardizing and sterilizing the training environment is that it deprives the trainees of the opportunity to encounter these stimuli and develop their own personalized arsenal of responses. Worse, if there's a mismatch between the responses that are taught during the training, and the temperament of the trainee, the outcome may even be detrimental – leaving them with a bitter taste of failure. This is why training is not always successful, and certainly not a substitute for real-life experience.
The second is the evaluation that is typically a prerequisite for certification. While the sterilized training environment only temporarily postpones the exposure to valuable real-life stimuli, evaluation can have a lasting effects on all but the most stubborn individuals.
Evaluation takes away the trainees opportunity to self-evaluate the outcome of their action. When professionals engage in real-life work, they have no choice but to self-evaluate. The brain creates an intricate mapping between action and the quality of the outcome – particularly the reactions from the stakeholders. When the judgement is fully outsourced to the trainer, it often creates the conflict between the trainee's own perception and that of the trainer. If the trainee is forced to internalize the trainer’s worldview, it can erode their confidence in their own ability to interpret and evaluate real-world situations. When that happens, critical thinking and creativity are diminished if not lost.
Although training does show success in some cases, it is often limited by its inability to account for the participants' diverse needs and temperaments, overly sterile environment, and its tendency to produce negative outcomes. When one seeks to make the training increasingly more realistic to counter these drawback, the inevitable conclusion is that real life work produces overall better results.
Real-life is not perfect
Real-life experience isn't without its drawbacks, however.
As I discussed in the previous section, real-life work includes many stimuli – some of them decidedly negative. When exposed to the wong combination of these factors, a professional may even regress or adopt undesirable responses. For instance, long working hours, chronic stress, bullying, or a mismatched management style – such as forcing an independent thinker to conform to arbitrary, poorly explained rules – can have an overall negative effect on growth.
Dealing with these negative effects requires a combination of experience – how ironic – and political leverage. The experience helps interpret and respond effectively to the negative influences, while political leverage (such as expertise or titles) helps eliminate or deflect them altogether. Unfortunately. these are rarely available to novices, leaving them more vulnerable to negative environments than seasoned practitioners.
When newbies join companies at the very start of their career, they are faced multiple predicaments – the need to learn the ropes on the one hand, and then need to learn how to navigate corporate dynamics on the other. For many people, this is also coupled with financial pressure, expectations from family, and so on. This makes the growth on the technical side unnecessarily difficult for them, and, in the worst case, create a negative association between the work and the unpleasant experiences they are subjected to. For those who enter the field this way, the trauma they carry into later stages of their career can become a lasting hindrance.
Where does this leave us?
There's clearly a need to help the new practitioners ease into the machine. If we look at the sheer number of people thrown at problems, and the mediocre results they achieve, it's hard not to conclude there's a problem.
For the newbies, jumping head-first into their career is a gamble – one that apparently doesn't pay very much, judging by how overworked and underpaid they are. There are too many factors to juggle simultaneously, and until they have built their stamina up, it's a frustrating environment that leads to cut corners, if not the middle. A more productive strategy would be to divide and conquer. First engage in playful learning of the fundamental hard skills in a relaxing environment at home or non-certifying personalized training, and calibrate the self-evaluation. Freelancing used to be a viable way to do this, but the competition and predatory platforms create new pressures that did not exist in the past, making freelancing somewhat less viable for the new generations
While financial pressures are real for many people, I believe that it's long-term more productive to deal with these issues separately, and not try to immediately tie it to the profession.
The companies can help the new practitioners by alleviating their financial pressures through paid internships, and make internships more hands-off. Sandbox environments can be provided where practitioners can work on real-life-like projects that are evaluated in non-technical terms by mock clients and stakeholders without creating political pressure, or by simulating real-life pressures on the product itself with artificial load and similar methods, but leaving the interns to deal with it by themselves. In fact, this doubles as an opportunity for the companies to identify unique traits and talents among the candidates and gauge their match for specific roles.
We currently have a cohort of developers that actually grew up this way. Virtually all of the Millennial, GenX and Boomer programmers grew up before the IT craze, and before IT jobs were seen as prestigious. Many of them started by playing with computers at home, and learning to love the craft before entering the universities or the corporate world. This is why these people sometimes have well-calibrated self-evaluation and response arsenals. In a way, they are among the generation of untainted programmers with (mostly) intact personal realities.
Rather than trying to hire the newer generations en-masse – an approach that consistently proves ineffective, and leading to mass layoffs in the times of crises – the companies would gain far more from leveraging the existing talent pool more effectively by accounting for the personal style and intuitions. Meanwhile they should help the new generation have a similarly productive start to create a new generation of programming powerhouses, instead of treating them as more fresh meat for the grinder.
Conclusion
This post started as a small nugget or naive commentary I was going to post on the social media – escalating into a train of thoughts, leading to a reflection on the 20 years I've spent in the industry, as a freelance developer, solo contributor, team member, and team leader.
I've tried to distill some of the things I've seen play out again and again – where people grow, where they stall, and where we might do better. I hope it gave you some food for thought, and maybe planted the seeds for a more productive way forward.
