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

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

Job postings requiring ten years of experience are arguing against a learner's mindset

Experienced people apply accumulated experience rather than learning things fresh, so demanding years of experience is a demand for experience over learning

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

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

Large enterprise software companies mostly hire for accumulated experience rather than learning ability, as evidenced by their continued hiring for decades-old skills like COBOL

He used to search enterprise career pages for COBOL and always found dozens of openings; someone with ten years only in COBOL cannot be called a learner

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

Harry Stebbings · published 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 embodies perpetual learning

16:34 Experience and learning are not incompatible

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

In some businesses experience and learning are compatible because experience gives you at-bats that teach you — investing is one of those, poker is not

The value of experience in these businesses is the repetitions that improve learning rather than a fixed body of knowledge

16:46 Compatibility depends on the business domain

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

Non-engineering staff should be expected to work technically — Shopify marketers ship landing pages through GitHub and salespeople write SQL rather than using a CMS

The company will teach the skills, but it wants people who want to learn new things, and the requirement selects for that type

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

Akin Babayigit · published 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 · published 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