We usually think that people with a lot of experience in a particular field are experts. Also, if they have a lot of experience in the same field, we think they will do better. However, there are many young people in this world who have a lot of wealth and honor. Could these people have achieved great success at a young age because they had a lot of experience?
To answer this question, let’s check some research results.
According to The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology, hiring people with high job performance correlation can increase productivity by more than $15 billion annually compared to hiring randomly, and hiring people with low job performance correlation can increase productivity by more than $5 billion annually compared to hiring randomly. In other words, people with high job performance correlation can be said to be good at their jobs.
Let’s look at some of the job performance correlation items mentioned in this study.
- High correlation
- Work sample test: 0.54
- IQ and similar intelligence tests: 0.51
- A structured interview that asks the same questions in the same order based on job analysis for all candidates: 0.51
- Personality tests such as conscientiousness: 0.31 ~ 0.41
- Low correlation
- Career, years: 0.18
- Education: 0.10
- Interests, hobbies: 0.10
In correlation (1 ~ -1), less than 0.2 means low correlation, which means there is no relationship between the two. In other words, career, education, and hobbies have no relationship with job performance. Career was not completely unrelated to job performance. For a few years, the correlation of career was quite high. However, after this period, the correlation of career decreased significantly. Among a person who has just graduated from college and a 2nd-year programmer, the 2nd-year programmer is more likely to have better skills. However, the difference between 5 years and 10 years of experience is not significant in judging skills.
Let’s check another research result.
According to Expertise in software design, when comparing people with a lot of experience and people with little experience, people with a lot of experience spent more time and effort understanding the problem. At the time this research result was announced, people with a lot of experience were considered experts, so this research result was used as a basis for spending more time on requirements analysis in many fields and companies.
However, recent studies have shown that people with great skills, although not statistically significant, spend less time understanding the problem than those with moderate skills.
What is my developer’s field like? Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams states that the best developers had ten times better performance than the worst developers, and those with moderate or higher performance did twice as well as those who did not. Developers with 10 years of experience did not outperform developers with two years of experience. However, developers under six months of experience who learned a new language reported poor performance.
This book says that the quality, not the quantitative aspect of the career, is important. It is said that how broad and diverse the developer’s experience was is deeply related to actual job performance.
Based on these contents, we can see that career has little to do with work performance. To be more precise, it can be said that career has nothing to do with work performance after a minimum career. Career does not represent the person’s ability and can only be used to distinguish whether the person is beginner or not.
If you believe too much in the career, you may misjudge that someone with a lot of experience but a lot of experience is a great person, and determining whether to hire or pay based on your career can be very damaging to the company. Instead of a career, it is better to hire structured interviews, job sample tests, and outsourcing tests, and it is better to involve people who will actually work with you in the hiring process.
We are in the wrong perception of equating career and skill. We need to think about other ways to test skills outside of this perception. In addition, We will have to make an effort to steadily improve my skills, away from the idea that as I gain experience, my skills will accumulate.
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