Caffeinated Coder

I recently read Jurgen Appelo’s post, Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last, and then Ted Neward’s somewhat harsh response, From the “You Must Be Trolling for Hits” Department….

Although both posts rang true when highlighting the various problems that occur when developers are deficient in either knowledge or experience, I don’t think either post pursued a very fruitful path by trying to prioritize one over the other.

There are simply too many horror stories of technical sabotage perpetrated by both architecture astronauts, who inappropriately apply their knowledge, and developer monkeys, who viciously fighting to protect absurdly sub-optimal status quos for no other reason than it has always been that way.

If both paths can potentially lead to such undesirable results, then what is the point of choosing between the lesser of two evils?

To me a much more interesting question to ask and then try to answer is what makes some knowledge and experience more valuable than other knowledge and experience.

In other words, how is it that I can interview two candidates with the exact same number of years of experience and an almost identical list of buzzwords on their resumes, yet there is still an order of magnitude difference between them in terms of the overall value they bring to an organization?

I believe the gap exists because there are a number of knowledge and experience ‘multipliers’ that some people utilize and others don’t.

An example of an experience multiplier would be self-reflection. A person who is naturally self-aware and systematically reflects on both their successes and failures is going to gain a lot more value from their experiences than a person who always focuses on the ‘what’ but never the ‘why’.

An example of a knowledge multiplier would be a healthy respect for context. Every methodology, best practice, framework, and tool performs optimally under a certain set of circumstances while performing terribly under other sets of circumstances. A person who is conscientious enough the learn the full context of the environment they are in before making any recommendations will be far more effective in being able to use their knowledge than someone who impulsively pushes the latest and greatest solution regardless of the costs and consequences.

The more multipliers that people employ, the higher quality of experience and knowledge they will have.

So if you’re trying to resolve the Experience vs. Knowledge debate for yourself so that you know whether to focus more on the number of years of experience or the number of relevant buzzwords on the next batch of resumes that shows up on your desk, try this instead.

Come up with a list of what you consider to be knowledge and experience multipliers (stay tuned for my list coming soon) and use them to create list of interview questions. Based on the answers to these questions, award each candidate a score of 1 to 10 for the quality of their experience and another score of 1 to 10 for the quality of their knowledge. Then add both numbers together and choose the candidate with the highest overall score.

It may not be a perfect solution, but at least it seems better to me than focusing solely on experience or solely on knowledge because you happened to have been burned by an architectural astronaut or developer monkey recently.

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