Sony Arouje

In our current system we judge experience based on number of years. Is number of years is the main criteria for judging a person’s experience? In my perspective it is wrong

In most of the recruitment process there will be a band, says 0-2 yrs Software Engineer, 3-5 yrs Sr Software Engineer and the band goes on. Are we seeing in a preconceived way that 2 years is not talented enough as a 5yrs one? There are people out there who are talented but less number of years to show and this strategy might filter out talents. Rather than counting the years, count the expertise the person has in the specific area.

Lets take an example of hiring for WCF, two person X and Y. X worked for 2 yrs in WCF and he created services but nothing extra ordinary. Y worked for 1 year he also created services, but he also worked some advanced areas, might be worked in Custom serialization or header manipulation, etc. So who has the expertise here in WCF, 2 yr experienced X or 1 year experienced Y? What will happen if we apply year filter here? I think one reason we are following this process is, it’s easy to finish our job.

Again the year of experience is another factor in deciding promotion. Most companies promote the person based on year of experience but not always based on performance or talent. Let’s take an example, in a team there is a talented person and YOE (Year of Experience) person (only in years but not much talent) and the company wants to promote the talented person. In this situation most managers does is, promote the talented person also promote the YOE person. So talented person is a tail of YOE person, also YOE person gets promotion without much effort.

It’s really a chaotic situation, but we need to find some order in chaos, other wise talents will slip out of this filtration.

What you feel about it? How we can improve? Leave your comments.