<i>"is it possible to fake experience by getting advice?"</i><p>Typically, you have to live out the words of the advice before honestly coming to understand them. Advice -- especially great advice -- is often received as theoretical, removed from specific context, and thus filed away in the deepest recesses of the mind. It doesn't come back to top of mind until a specific situation is encountered, and the advice is suddenly recalled. Then it clicks.<p>Theoretical advice is generally incomplete unless/until activated by personal context. Advice isn't a substitute for experience, but rather, a framework through which to process experience.
Now that I have experience... nope, it's still not worth anything. I honestly feel I'm writing less good code than I did in my late teens - I'm less ambitious, and I take longer to get things done. I know a bit more about certain technologies, but honestly I can pick the important bits of anything up in a couple of days. My experience has got me better-paying jobs, but that seems to be all it's good for.<p>(And yes, I am in a best-coder-in-the-room situation. Straying from the topic a bit, where does one go not to be that? I don't have the skills (or the appetite for risk) to found a startup. I've wondered about the big-name tech companies (google, twitter), but my limited experience so far has been that the bigger a company, the worse. It seems like by the time I've heard of a potential employer they're already past the point where they'd be fun to work for)
two implications:<p>1. there's a huge difference between "oh, i can pick up rails in a week" and "7 years of rails experience". being super smart is insufficient for certain employers. you want the guy making foundation technical choices to have already learned from his mistakes<p>2. if you're in your twenties, and you're the best coder/entrepreneur/whatever you know, your hubris is blinding you to your potential, should you work with people more experienced than you. this is not to say you can't win the startup lottery when you're young, but your long term expectation is higher if you learn from others before you do.
I once heard an anecdote that the 3rd version of a system is when it starts to become really efficient.<p>The 1st version is rife with hacks and inefficiencies, but it works.<p>The 2nd version builds upon all the learnings of the first version, but is bloated because every little lesson learned is applied.<p>The 3rd version is where the experience and data gained from the first two iterations really starts paying off. The code is more efficient and the team knows what is truly important and what isn't.<p>P.S. Has anyone else heard this anecdote before as well? I've tried tracking down its origin to no avail.
Experience is not a track record.<p>If there's one skill thats invaluable in any industry, it's a track record; of problem solving experience. An education simply won't give this unless you're possibly in some extended research role.<p>If you are lucky enough to get an education, it's another foundation to work from, but it will not make up for experience resulting in a track record.<p>Assuming this post refers to the track record of positively learning from our experience; we see the world does kind of run this way. Can't always fake it till you make it forever.<p>Having a bit of both:<p>Experience and track record of results will always beat education. Why? Education and theoretical stuff isn't in the real world often enough.<p>Experience, resulting in track record of successfully overcoming challenges is very, very valuable.
"You know some things to be impossible. Most things that were impossible or impractical years ago became possible or will become possible some time later. Your experience might tell you that something you want to do can’t be done. Other people will go on to do them."<p>As I started to gain experience and learned about what sort of things worked and what didn't, a boss of mine gave me a wonderful piece of advice: even if you're 100% sure that the answer to a question is no, give yourself ten or fifteen minutes to think it over a bit before responding. What you may have seen in the past may not apply anymore, and if you give yourself some time to think about a proposal you may be able to recognize some really novel or useful ideas.
On the other hand, some things really are just impossible, and attacking those problems with youthful zeal will not change that.<p>In my experience, when people take something we all agree is impossible and start doing it, it is usually because they've redefined the problem in such a way that forward effort can be made. Termination checking comes to mind. It isn't that the impossible becomes possible (mostly), it's that we find a smaller or different domain in which progress is possible and useful.
"And lastly, something I’ve been wondering: is it possible to fake experience by getting advice?"<p>It must be hard, because so few people seem to do it. The history of humanity would look different if we didn't all seem to have to repeat the same mistakes.<p>I suppose at a hypothetical extreme you could be a Chinese Room-like puppet of the advisor. But in real life you have to generalize at some point. Behind the words of the advice is the <i>understanding</i>, which is the hard part. Understanding doesn't even necessarily follow from one's own experience. It takes the hard but irreplaceable work of reflection. One can try to reverse engineer understanding from advice, but regardless we can say that while experience may not be necessary, advice is not sufficient.<p>(In some vague sense of work-dimensionality: advice < understanding <= experience.)
well, experience is just data and so its use in solving problems requires its input to an algorithm, which in this case resides in wetware. In other words, i suppose the value of experience depends entirely on the person who possess it.<p>We need to hire a couple programmer/analyst. No threshold experience level was required, because we want the best talent. After interviewing a dozen or so candidates, it occurred to me that someone with average intellectual horsepower, never seemed to mine the maximum value from the experience that they had. Why?<p>Either (i) they seemed to just store their experiences as a <i>look-up table</i> and then access it as a proxy for genuine creative thinking ("sure, i've seen that problem before, and we solved it this way ...." Granted, sometimes this expedient is just what you need, but it's undesirable if one's cognitive repertoire is limited in this way; or (ii) they failed to <i>abstract</i> that experience into broadly applicable principles. (I suspect this is the failure that is responsible when someone says "he/she has does not have five years of experience, they have one year of experience, five times." Without abstraction, unless your memory/recall is essentially perfect, it's difficult to actually use your experience to gain leverage over a new problem.
Experience is practicing making mistakes on somebody else's dime.<p>It gives you the understanding that something is a good or a bad decision sooner than somebody who hasn't had this practice.
> And lastly, something I’ve been wondering: is it possible to fake experience by getting advice?<p>Yes and no. You need to have some experience to understand the advice and interpret it to your situation. Everyone provides advice from their perspective, which is absolutely useless to you, unless you have the experience to convert that to your situation and learn from it.
true experience is knowing at exactly what time and date you would go back in time to kick your own butt<p>Experience tends to pre-empt innovation: I really don't think this is caused by experience, I think it is caused by habit. I know a lot of people who have experience who have said to me "We did X, Y, and Z at my previous gigs, but I've been thinking...." Don't fall into habits and keep the sense of what if and experience provide a heck of a platform for innovation.<p>Experience takes time to get: yep - especially if you don't listen closely to the people who have already taken the hit.<p>You know some things to be impossible: more along the path of habits overshadowing experience. I had a huge amount of experience with Sybase databases. I knew some things were impossible given how they worked, but it didn't stop me from exploring when the next version showed up. Don't allow yourself to build a set of superstitions that overshadow changing conditions.
Off-topic: how can anyone read this? His layout keeps popping up and down, and the second you scroll away from the top, the image in the corner breaks and the text goes all fuzzy.<p>Screenshot: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/6SCgN.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/6SCgN.png</a>, no addons in use.
paraphrasing Paul Arden: "Experience is lazy"<p><a href="http://cl.ly/3A0j1O0d180e2p3O1K02" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/3A0j1O0d180e2p3O1K02</a> from <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Not-How-Good-Want/dp/0714843377/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Not-How-Good-Want/dp/0714843377/</a>