The Myth of Age Equals Experience
In any professional environment it is frequent to talk about years of experience like an irrefutable measure of the capacitation or level of expertise or competence of a person. Job descriptions use “years of experience” as a minimum requirement. I always think: you can have a number of years of experience, but what did you do in those years? How did you leverage those years?
I cannot avoid thinking about the Provisional Driving License or Learning Licenses that some countries use to help new drivers gain experience and skills safely before obtaining an unrestricted license. For a specific period of time, new drivers have specific restrictions, like speed limits, zero tolerance for alcohol, etc. After that set period of time, you stop being considered a newbie, and the restrictions don’t apply anymore because now you have some experience. A fixed period of time, it doesn’t matter whether you drove at all or not during that time.
That is, in a nutshell, what years of experience mean at work.
Time gives you nothing by itself.
In Spanish, a proverb says something like: “The devil knows more because he is old than because he is a devil” (Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo). Well, that’s not true.
It is assumed that with age comes wisdom, but age only means time; it doesn’t say anything about what you did with that time. In the same way, space is a function of speed and time, and a lot of time passing doesn’t imply that you covered a lot of space; for that, you also need to assume some significant speed.
When we attribute expertise to a professional because of not being young or wisdom to elders just because of being elders, we are condescending: a smart, mentally ambitious person who is older than others and filled that time with continuous challenges and pushing boundaries, likely has a greater depth and breadth of knowledge and experience and is way ahead intellectually. But a person who got old without adding much to that depth and breath, without expanding perspectives and exploring new fields, without continuously challenging his own beliefs or skills, is just older and dumber, more encapsulated in the same ideas, with smaller and smaller horizons, and more corrupted by the endogamy of his or her own thoughts.
Time can take you to great lengths if you keep moving, but it will also help you rotten if you don’t.
How time can set you back
One of my favorite maxims is this fragment from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland):
- ‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
I think it describes perfectly the idea I’m trying to convey here.
You may be more or less smart and have more or less knowledge or experience at a certain point, but your ideas are discrete and not infinite. When you have a limited set of perspectives and do not continuously expand them over time, your thought processes become insular and self-reinforcing, leading to several negative cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Let’s talk about some of them:
Self-feeding or Circular Feeding of Thoughts
Echo Chamber Effect: When you are exposed only to ideas that reinforce your existing beliefs, you are less likely -and less interested- to encounter information that challenges or broadens your perspectives. This creates an echo chamber where the same ideas are repeated and amplified without critical examination. You just believe what you always believed, more and more.
Confirmation Bias: With limited ideas, you tend to seek out information that confirms your preconceptions, ignoring or dismissing contradictory evidence. This reinforces existing biases and makes it harder to accept new, potentially valuable information. Amazon has this leader principle “Are right a lot”, that says that leaders seek to disconfirm their believes.
Intellectual Stagnation: Without exposure to diverse ideas, your thinking can become stagnant. You are less likely to engage in creative problem-solving or innovative thinking because you are not challenged to consider alternative viewpoints or solutions. Your ideas will rot and smell like water in a pond.
Endogamic Nature of Thoughts
Narrow Perspectives: Endogamy in thinking refers to only engaging with ideas that come from within a limited circle. This can lead to a narrow worldview where you miss out on the rich diversity of experiences and knowledge available from different cultures, disciplines, and backgrounds.
Reduced Critical Thinking: When your ideas are not subjected to external scrutiny or diverse perspectives, you are less likely to develop strong critical thinking skills. Not only you think you are right, also your capacity of telling apart good from bad diminishes. Critical thinking thrives on evaluating different viewpoints and synthesizing information from various sources or at least taking them into consideration.
Increased Bias and Prejudice: A lack of exposure to diverse ideas can lead to the development of strong biases and prejudices. Without understanding different perspectives, you may develop misconceptions and stereotypes about people or ideas that are unfamiliar to you.
Impact on Awareness of Multiple Realities and Complexities
Simplistic Understanding: The world is complex, and understanding it requires acknowledging and integrating multiple realities and perspectives. When your ideas are limited, you tend to oversimplify complex issues, missing out on the nuances that are crucial for a deeper understanding.
Inflexibility in Thinking: Limited ideas can make you inflexible in your thinking, as you are not accustomed to adapting your viewpoints in light of new information. This rigidity can prevent you from effectively navigating and responding to the complexities of the world.
Reduced Empathy: Understanding and empathizing with others often requires recognizing their unique experiences and perspectives. A narrow set of ideas can limit your ability to relate to and understand people who are different from you, reducing your overall empathy.
And what if you were quite smart?
I hate to break this to you: it is worst. That will multiply the speed of your downfall.
When you are dumb and time passes, you may stay as dumb or get dumber, and you are likely aware that you are not the smartest and probably you did never care for it.
But when you were smart once, or when you are a bit over the average in intelligence or experience, you have something against you: you have a certain level of self-confidence and entitlement that will mislead you. I think about it as the opposite of the impostor syndrome. You were smart once, and that makes you think you still are, while the truth is that maybe others had years to get ahead of you, and you didn’t realize at what point you got behind.
I believe this is one of the reasons leading to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their own abilities and competence due to a lack of self-awareness and knowledge. Those experiencing it have excessive self-confidence and may not recognize their own incompetence, leading them to believe they are more capable than they actually are. This overconfidence can result in poor decision-making and resistance to feedback or learning opportunities.
Key characteristics of the Dunning-Kruger effect include:
Overestimation of abilities: They believe they are more skilled or knowledgeable than they truly are.
Lack of self-awareness: They are often unaware of their limitations and deficiencies.
Resistance to feedback: They may dismiss constructive criticism or advice from others, believing they know better.
Poor decision-making: Their overconfidence can lead to flawed judgments and decisions.
Difficulty recognizing expertise: They may have trouble recognizing true expertise in others and overvalue their own opinions.
In contrast to impostor syndrome, where individuals doubt their capabilities despite evidence of their competence, the Dunning-Kruger effect involves an inflated self-assessment that is not supported by actual skills or knowledge, creating a vicious cycle which will sequentially exacerbate the situation, leading to a worsening state over time.
If you were smart but you didn’t do much about it…most probably, after some time, you will be behind those that were just average or even mediocre.
Hic sunt leones
This Latin saying, that translates to "Here be lions", was historically used by cartographers on maps to indicate unexplored or dangerous territories, symbolizing the unknown or potentially perilous nature of those areas. The idea is that beyond the known world, there could be lions or other dangers lurking.
Unknown unknowns.
When I was a senior developer, with some 10 years of very deep experience and working quite actively in system design and solution design, I remember coming across a job offer for a Senior Software Architect. I wondered -I honestly couldn’t figure it out- what an architect can possibly do that I was not already doing.
Then time passed and I learned a few more things that I didn’t know and made me understand that there were so much that I didn’t know before, and then one more thing, and one more…so I understood there would always be much more I cannot even figure out at any given stage.
It is some kind of magic when one day you realize that you are in front of something you didn’t know: a previously unknown unknown becoming a “known unknown”, and your world becomes a bit bigger, your horizons expand a bit, and you are conquering yet one more step ahead of yourself, adding one more dimension. Like clouds opening and revealing the sun behind them.
One of the most exciting things in life is the certainty that there is always something else to learn, something else that you cannot even figure out now because it is not a bit on top of something that you already know but something that you don’t even know yet that exists. A world of knowledge beyond the known world.
Squeezing time to be at the top of your game
As the Queen of Wonderland said, you will need to run as twice as fast to go anywhere. Times pass whether or not you move. And everything around you is moving.
Expanding your horizons and challenging your own thinking will lead to greater intellectual growth and a more comprehensive understanding of the world. There are a few simple pieces of advice I can share (this is intentionally an unordered list; the order says nothing about their relative importance):
Embrace lifelong learning and curiosity. Learn continuously and be open to new experiences and knowledge. The more you expose yourself to diverse ideas, the more you will be able to understand and navigate the complexities of the world and find more and more things that interest you, give you curiosity or reveal something that was obscure or unknown to you.
Seek diverse perspectives: Actively seek out and engage with ideas that are different from your own. Read widely, talk to people from different backgrounds, and challenge your own assumptions regularly.
Critical reflection: Develop the habit of critically reflecting on your own beliefs and the information you consume or produce. Ask yourself why you hold certain beliefs and whether there is evidence that contradicts them. Especially when you are too sure of something, take a step back and try to prove yourself wrong.
Leverage negative feedback loops. This is not only about other people giving you feedback. There is more to it. Feedback loops are a fundamental concept across various fields of knowledge in which there is a fit for systems theory and dynamic processes. They help maintain stability in systems with mechanisms that detect deviations and trigger responses to correct them (for example, body temperature regulation in biology, supply and demand equilibrium in economics, predator-prey population dynamics in ecology, etc). In human behavior and social systems, feedback loops are the most basic and most powerful mechanisms in behavior regulation, social dynamics, and organizational behavior. This is by embracing and actioning the feedback that others give you, but also the feedback that the world gives you: a failed interview, a failed exam, a romantic rejection, finding out you were wrong about something about which you were very assertive, etc. There is always so much to learn if you take the time to absorb it and reflect on it. I have a separate article about leveraging feedback:
Time is a fractal space; there is time inside the time. There are days inside the weeks and hours inside the days. How many hours do you work every week? When you like something, when you want to get ahead on something, the day doesn’t have just 8 hours. There are people who work all day, who work on weekends, who work on vacation, and it doesn’t feel like work. If a person works 80h per week and other work 40h…in the number same years not only there is double factual experience…more importantly: experience and growth are not linear functions, but maybe something like quadratic or exponential. Being everything else the same, reaching someone who is already ahead will be a very, very hard thing to do.
To explain this visually, imagine the orange line is the person working double hours compared to the person represented by the blue line. The X axis is the time, and the Y axis is the relevant experience if we could quantify that as a number. The orange gets ahead but a significant amount.
Choose your battles, and let them be a lot. You need to accumulate significant, relevant, and broad experience, not just experience. What specifically you have done matters as much as how much of it you have done. If you are a javascript developer that just did web forms 10 years for 80h per week, probably you won’t get ahead of someone who worked less years and less hours in a significant broad spectrum of technologies and domains.
A bit of my own story
I think about my career, and it could have been hard to predict. At different points in time, I was hands-on in qBasic, Pascal, C/C++, Java, PHP, Android, Angular, NodeJS, Python, and a longer list. I did video games, embedded systems, desktop applications, websites, and mobile applications. I made music and content and marketing campaigns and analytics, Facebook apps and WordPress sites, streaming systems, distributed systems, ERPs and CMS and integrations and ML, and white label multi-tenancy systems. I did system design, infrastructure, architecture, and observability, and I created vision, roadmaps, and PnLs. Most of the things that my teams have to do now…I have done it at some points with my own hands. That gives me a sweet yet serious perspective, some respect for the people who do the work, and some ability to give certain directions. Most importantly, most things don’t arrive as a surprise, and I can speak comfortably.
Had I spent my life doing always the same thing, my experience could be long, but I would miss the depth, breath, and my experience wouldn’t be intricate and intertwined. And that’s why makes me feel experienced and mature, not the fact alone of having been around for some time.
That’s why I value the multiple dimensions of the experience, how many different battles you fought and more or less survived for some period of time.
Not time alone, but you do need time
Said all this, time alone doesn’t give you experience by itself, but you do need time to be able to obtain it. All the above doesn’t happen overnight, and I reject the idea of someone being so good that can skip the line and go straight to the top without the time and the opportunities to be exposed to a number of situations and dedicate some sufficient time to it.
Conclusion
Time alone won't take you anywhere, and it can even take you back because your knowledge rots if you don’t keep learning and growing every day.
There is always a whole world ahead of you that you don’t know just yet, and it takes you to be intentional to set foot on it and time to explore.
Age and time don’t mean experience, and they don’t mean wisdom. Time gives you additional white pages, but it is up to you to write something meaningful on those.
So, now we know what doesn’t mean experience. So, how do we actually calibrate or evaluate the experience of a professional? I guess that will require one more article. Stay tuned!