Do You Have Experience With…?
It's a running gag among programmers that job descriptions, often created without input from technical team members, will ask for five years of experience in a technology that hasn't been around for even three years yet. And recently, nowhere has the fallacy in that been more apparent than with generative AI. In a sense, we're all newbies here. By the time you've become proficient in working with one particular model, the next one gets released. If we take this narrow, "HR needs to check the boxes"-style view of skill, then everybody is a bloody beginner at this.
This applies not just to individual job seekers, but consultants and their companies as well. How many years of GenAI-productization experience does Delloite have? Accenture? AICE Labs, for that matter? In every case the answer is, "as long as those things have been around, which isn't really that long".
Explicit experience, measured in years, with exactly one piece of technology or its subdomains is a poor measure of the likelihood that the hire will get you what you need. What changes it the new and shiny tool they get to wield. What stays the same is their methodical approach (or lack thereof...) to the underlying challenges. At the end of the day, it's engineering: Solving complex challenges with the best tools available under multiple competing constraints. Once you've got a knack for that, the actual tools become much more fluid, and checking how much time a practitioner has racked up in tool A versus tool B becomes much less relevant.
For instance, take someone with twenty years of programming experience but no prior JavaScript knowledge, who has deeply internalized the principles of good coding, then run them give them a one-hour overview to the language. Then pit them against a programming novice who spent three months in an intensive JavaScript bootcamp. I'd bet money the veteran will write better JavaScript.
With AI, we certainly have lots of new kids on the block who poured hours into prompting and vibe coding tutorials. They'll all be outperformed by those with solid engineering principles.
A quick personal note, it's the end-of-summer, almost-back-to-school chaos, so while I try, just for myself, to keep posting regularly, it's a bit more challenging than usual. :)
