Is requiring years of experience in hiring compatible with wanting a learner's mindset?

Harry Stebbings · Aug 14, 2024

Job postings that require ten years of experience are implicitly arguing against a learner's mindset

When you're young your intelligence is fluid and you're learning; later in a career you're applying accumulated experience rather than learning, so experience requirements select for appliers, not learners

15:38 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Harry Stebbings · Aug 14, 2024

Large enterprise software companies mostly do not treat experience as at-bats for learning; they hire for narrow long-tenured expertise

He used to search their career pages for COBOL and always found dozens of openings requiring experience in a decades-old language, which cannot describe a learner

Scope: about very large enterprise software companies

17:08 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Kaz Nejatian · Aug 14, 2024

Requiring years of experience and wanting a learner's mindset are not incompatible

He requires five years of investing experience on his own team yet still wants and personally practices continuous learning

16:34 Experience and learning are not incompatible

Harry Stebbings · Aug 14, 2024

Whether experience and learning are compatible depends on the business: it is easy in investing but not in poker

In some businesses experience gives you at-bats that help you learn better; in others it doesn't

16:46 Compatibility depends on the business domain

Harry Stebbings · Aug 14, 2024

Non-engineering staff such as marketers and salespeople should work through code and SQL rather than a content management system or WYSIWYG tools

It selects for and reinforces people who want to learn new things; the company will teach the skills but people must want to

18:41 Requiring technical tools for non engineers selects for and reinforces learner mindset

Akin Babayigit · Jun 26, 2023

Hire for hunger over domain expertise, because any relevant domain skill can be learned in a several-month window but hunger is innate and cannot be taught

Tripledot's marketing team — the strongest he knows in gaming — was mostly people with no prior gaming experience: good schools, self-driven, type-A overachievers who will kill themselves to get the job done; you can teach marketing to anyone in six months, you cannot teach hunger

33:09 Hire for hunger not domain expertise since domain skills are learnable quickly

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Hiring the person who has solved the exact same problem before is the wrong instinct; you want someone with relevant experience who still has something new to learn

He invokes the mindfulness maxim that in the beginner's mind there are endless possibilities and in the expert's mind very few — someone being stretched has all their senses more aware

16:12 Want relevant experience but still room to learn not someone whos solved the identical problem before