The Positives of Experienced People

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side, looking at the positives. This time, we talked about the newbies, the people that are entry-level, that are beginners either in overall skill or at our specific company, organization, team, things like that. The people that we have to introduce a little bit to some of the things that are going on. This episode, we're going to flip gears and we're going to look at the veterans. Negatives may not be seen as having negatives to some extent because that's what you want to do. You want to hire, typically, experience. You want to hire people that can come in and get the job done. To throw a couple of negatives out, though, from dealing with veterans, and by veterans, I mean people that are heavily experienced, that have been around for a while, been around the block more than a few times, and come in with, or on a given day, come in with a lot of experience and a lot of domain knowledge related to whatever the company is or the job. Well, one of the things which we've actually pointed out through a lot of this season that are negatives are the getting set in our ways kinds of issues. This doesn't go as far as that adage that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I think most people that are in our technology style careers, we learn a lot. Even the people that have been in this for decades, most of them are still heavy learners. That's just sort of what they do. Particularly if they stay technology in the technology sector. Some people bail out at some point and move over to the management side and things like that. But even there, there's just so many changes that there is, maybe that's not their primary thing is to learn, but you probably would be surprised at how much they learning is part of their weekly, monthly, annual approach to work. You can stop, but at any point that you do, you start becoming less valuable. There's always going to be that learning, but some of the negatives are like I said, it's sort of that getting set in your ways is that you've done something so many times that you really don't think through it. It's almost a mindless task. It's also known as going through the motions or phoning it in. You just sort of do it and you get it done and you move on. Once you get to that, once you get settled into a process or a technology, you're not going to grow because you're settled. That's one of the things you're not going to worry about growing anymore in that. This is actually where entry level and veterans work together very well is because sometimes those entry level people will knock the rust off the, or the sediment I guess off of the more experienced people and get them to free things up and actually be less settled, actually think through things again. Now on the flip side, one of the things that's probably one of the most valuable assets of experienced people is that they're able to shortcut things because they don't have to think through some of these tasks. They can jump right through them and get through very quickly. There are studies out there that particularly in the technology world, particularly software development that experienced, we'll call them experienced workers, are as much as 10 times as productive as entry level. You may think that that's a crazy difference, but when you think about it on a big scale, putting together, building an application, let's say, putting together requirements and design, that alone, if you know what you're doing so you don't have to struggle through every step, you should be able to add up pretty quickly. You realize that, yeah, I can see where it could take. It could take a couple of weeks for somebody experienced to do something and months for somebody else because there's learning and evaluating and maybe even a little trial and error, things like that that you don't have to do when you're experienced. You've done it before. It's not that you don't do it, it's that you've already done it, that you come into the situation already having spent that time. I think just on the most simple example would be, let's say you've got somebody that knows C-sharp and somebody that doesn't and they're going to do a project. Well, the one that doesn't know C-sharp, they're going to have to learn C-sharp and the other one's off and running. Then, of course, you get into the details of, okay, well, what is, in quotes, learning C-sharp? What does that entail? Are there going to be, is it going to be on the job? Are there going to be things where they think they understand it and then they get in and realize, oh, wait, I hadn't learned this right. I've got to go back, I've got to refactor, I've got to change things or whatever. You have these dead-end paths that we go down when we're learning something. If we've already experienced it, we know that, oh, wait, that's a path we don't need to go down. That alone can save a lot of time. It's sort of like a maze. If somebody's walking through a maze and they don't know, if one person knows a lot of turns or dead-ends, they're going to get through it a lot faster. Whereas somebody that doesn't know which turns anywhere are dead-ends or not, they're going to probably end up exploring a lot of dead-ends. The one that's deterred from going down dead-end paths is going to get there faster. They're not going to waste that time. Veteran workers provide us time already spent. It's a wisdom we'll call or knowledge, however you want to look at it, that allows experienced workers to direct their efforts towards things that are going to push the ball forward, we'll say, that can advance the project. They're going to be less likely to go down rabbit holes that end up taking you away from your focus. That's not anything that's negative against others. It's just if you don't know, you don't know. It's a huge value for experience. Another one that falls right up into that is that experienced people are... This is tough because the short of it is that experienced people have a little better idea of what they know and what they don't know. But that's not to say that they typically are going to know everything or know what everything is and know that, oh, hey, I'm 60% of the way along knowing everything about this topic. I think we know in real world and life, that's not how things work. But I think you do get, as you get further into knowledge, that you get in a sense of at least areas that you don't know and areas that you're comfortable with. In any case, the benefit is at least you have areas that you're comfortable with. You can quickly move through some areas and then struggle your way into the... Spend more effort maybe and a little more struggle on those newer or advanced areas. In this case, I mean, think of a video game where there may be especially something that's very repetitive where you've got levels. Sometimes you have people can fly through the lower levels because they've done it a much, but then they get further along and they get to the advanced levels and stuff they haven't seen as much. And so that's where they end up spending more of their time because they get there. They get to keep tackling those higher level issues. Another thing that the veterans give us is it's like a pack mule to work with to put some of the... I don't know if heavy is not necessarily, but we'll say the heavy thinking loads on them. While you've got these... Hopefully you've got a mix where you've got low to mid-level experienced people that can get most of the work done. And again, think about the Pareto principle. Think about that 80-20 rule where 80% of the work is 20% of the effort and then the other, vice versa, the last 20% of the effort is 80% or 20% of the product or the project or the work is 80% of the effort. Experienced people allow you to get into that last 20%, that huge effort stuff and start cranking through that. And it allows you to balance out if you think of experienced people being 10 times as productive as entry level, then it would almost make sense that you could have those entry level people doing the work in that core 80% that's not as much of an effort. It would almost balance it out because then you've got this heavier effort, but at least you're getting through it with people that are more suitable to get that kind of work done. And that's what they want to do. And that again goes into, it's almost an opposite of grunt work. Sometimes grunt work is enjoyable basically because you don't have to think. You can go, you can do it, you don't maybe have as much stress and you just chug your way through it. You just plod your way through it. Higher end work can be exhausting and frustrating. And so sometimes it's nice to not be that experienced person and not have to carry that weight. And so it frees you up to, frees the rest of the team up to have a little less stress and have a little more time to enjoy the stop and smell the roses, to actually sort of let technology settle in a little bit and let the learning settle in and let them really absorb it and take advantage of it so that as they move along, they actually come out of a project much more knowledgeable. Experienced people may not gain in amounts as much knowledge, but they'll be able to progress as well if it's just at a different level. I like to go back to that maze analogy because this is the next big positive I think that experienced veteran workers give us. And that, think about that dead end analogy part of the maze. Experienced people give us that opportunity, they give us a guide to tell us sometimes that those dead ends are going to be dead ends. Now I understand we don't always follow that and sometimes we don't always follow that direction and sometimes we go down those dead end paths anyways. But when we do listen, then there is a, you know, whatever that amount of frustration related to going down that dead end is, we get to miss it, we get to skip it. Not only do these people that have experience bring us time spent on certain tasks and allow us to move more quickly through those, they also have their own mistakes and errors and suffering that they've gone through that they paid the price and they can allow us to not have to repeat that. And so what they went through, as they say, what the pioneers cut the paths for the next group of people, well, these are in our sense, they're pioneers in that area. They've already gone through, they've done it, they've worked on it. They know the paths that are saved, they know that the ones that are dead ends and they can help us move much more quickly through a lot of the challenges that we have to deal with. So even though there are some memes or tropes that we have that are tied to experienced people that are negative, where you've maybe got prima donnas or the guru on the mountaintop that seems unapproachable and other things that can be seen as negatives, the wisdom and experience that they can impart are definitely a positive. And that's where I think most of us agree. It's probably a harder sell to say that there are the positives that we've had with entry level and beginners versus experienced people. I think we all pretty much accept that those experienced people bring experience to the table. I think it just helps us to think through what does that experience actually provide us. And that's where these positives come in, where you look at things like avoiding errors to move more quickly through certain portions of our implementation or design or requirements gathering. When you've got people who have already done it, then they're going to help us basically sort of go the path they did. Now, not always. Like I said, we may question their choices and their motives and things like that, but at least we have the opportunity to have somebody that has on their side experience. They've been there so they can guide us around, just like in travel. If you go into a new city or region or something like that, it's nice to have a guide to point you to where these things are, to help you understand the lay of the land and know where common things are. Because without it, we get to the last positive I want to cover is without it, we have to reinvent the wheel. And that's, and I guess not reinvent the wheel, it's just we would have to invent the wheel. But the whole idea of reinventing the wheel comes with first, somebody with experience invented the wheel the first time. So while we may not necessarily follow that, there are key foundational things that have been built before that we can build our solution on top of. We can stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us, and it allows us to get to new heights and accomplish things that otherwise we would not be able to do. It gets a little, it gets lost, I think a little in the mix these days because some of the systems we have are so complex. Even the libraries, the frameworks, even the core language features and development environments and things like that and operating system core features that they provide are, they're second nature to us. We've been around for so long that we just get used to it. We just sort of almost assume maybe that it's always been that way. And it was not. We had people that went before us, those experienced people that put these things in place. So where we can go out now and we can Google pretty much whatever topic you want, you can get some examples, you can probably see YouTube videos on it. Somebody had to do that. And so those are maybe specific examples, but even in our general work, we're going to have templates, we're going to have prior source and things like that that experience people that veteran workers can point us to so we don't have to go from nothing and try to figure it all out. We can jump into, we'll call it the good stuff. We can jump into new development and things that are really moving the ball forward much as they do. As I started off saying, experienced people are going to get you to a point where you can move the ball forward faster as a team. So while they will individually be able to get to that point, they also provide us a framework or safety net or whatever you want to call it, a foundation that allows a whole team to get to that point sooner. Challenge of the Week. Are you in your mind a veteran or an entry level resource on your team? And then after this, listen to this episode and the one before, are you, whichever role you're in, are you doing your best to bring out the positives of being in that situation? That's a very personal question, I think. So this is something that's worth thinking through is, am I bringing to the table the that I should be bringing considering my role in my situation? Am I being the best me that I can be? And you're not, none of us are. We're not the best. We can only get better. And so maybe keeping that in mind, how are you going to be a better developer as a entry level or mid level or experienced? How are you going to be better this week? Not today and this week. And while you're pondering that, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noir podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoir.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.