Experience, no experience

There is this William's Coffee Pub on Queen Street that I love going to. Of course if you knew that I have only gone there twice then you would wonder whether that's enough time for me to judge wether I like it or not. Also, if you knew me well you would know that I change my mind quite a lot and for me to go somewhere twice and still like it, it's quite an accomplishment. Good on you Williams Coffee Pub on Queen Street!
So, as I was saying, I like this place quite a lot. I like it because it has this unique feeling to it you know? It's like walking into a place with class but which it's still affordable. It's like going into a cafe' where you might find interesting people, even if you don't. It's like entering a place in Europe while you are still in Brampton. Once you walk inside it's almost impossible to miss the gigantic blackboard with the menu on it written in different colored chalk. If you are lucky and it's not crowded you might be able to get a booth along the wall where you can sit and lay back while appreciating a nice cup of coffee or a fruit smoothie, or a nice piece of cheese cake. If you are not so lucky you might still be able to find an empty table somewhere with a couple of unused chairs. It's as unique a place as any of the other dozens of Williams Coffee Pubs spread throughout the city, damn globalization! But that's a subject for another blog.

I was there the other night with my fiancée and we were having a conversation about the importance of experience in the workforce. I was having a blended coffee smoothie which I hoped would wake me up for the ride home. But turns out it didn't. With the times as they are, with people getting laidoff left and right, and resumes being done to compulsive levels; I began to think about what most dread the most. "Do I have enough experience," or from the employers' point of view "Do you have enough experience."

It seems to me that people sometimes do not realize that there is a catch in that method of thinking. I have seen for myself that there is a problem with that mentality. For an enterprise to function well, in my opinion there must be a balance. Of course you need experienced people in your staff, but it's also important that you look and hire inexperienced personnel. Experience only functions well and becomes a benefit when coupled with inexperience. If you haven't noticed, maybe you should be a little more observant, but experience in many cases means that you know a vast number of ways in which things won't work. It's fine if you don't agree with me. You think I am wrong. Just humour me for a bit. We as humans are programmed to draw parallels. If an infant tries to grab a light bulb and gets burnt, he will stay away from all types of illuminating objects while the memory lasts (do I really need to mention not to try this? ). But it also means that he might be scared to play with a safe toy which emits light.

In a strange way knowledge sometimes puts a box around us from which it can be hard to get out. The walls of the box are constructed by the parallels we draw. I remember one day I was looking for a particular book in the catalog computer at my local library. I was looking for a Chinese cooking book. I kept trying different combinations of Chinese cooking books, but I would get one hit returned along with a bunch of Italian or Spanish cooking book results.
It became noticeable perhaps through my cursing that I was struggling, and a nice Samaritan came to the rescue. I struggled not to curse as I explained the problems I was having. Finally she said, why don't you try typing China, hitting enter, and then typing cooking books. "What a moron," I thought to myself. She is trying to tell me, me, the computer scientist how a database works. If she had half a brain even if it was shrunken in pickle sauce she would still know that two different queries, that's right they are called queries, are separate entities. But to humour her, I tried it.

Lo and behold it worked!

It seems that this was a smart database which kept context, so after I keyed in China and later cooking books it returned just about every cooking book in China (there are a lot!). She didn't know how databases worked so she was open to try anything. She had no box. Me, on the other hand, well...Let's leave it at that.

If you have a bunch of people with a ton of experience trying to solve a new revolutionary problem that might require out of the box thinking, you will get a bunch of whiteboards horribly harassed and a couple of trees killed in report pages explaining why this problem can't be solved. Or, in the better cases you get solutions which cost billions of dollars, a kidney, and a squirrel. And although this is true, it doesn't mean that the experienced staff are stupid and can't figure out less expensive ways. It's just that they are blinded by previous knowledge and they have probably built a bunch of redundancies into the solution.

On the other hand if you get a bunch of people with no experience you might end up with a solution that costs twenty bucks,a squirrel, and works perfectly well on Tuesdays.

However if you combine the Chutzpa and genius that comes from the freedom of not knowing what won't work with the experience of those who know, you might end up with a product that's reasonable, cost effective, and you might spare a squirrel.
It's like this, the inexperienced people will bring the crazy ideas that range in the whole spectrum of what's possible and what isn't. That by definition must include what works. And the experienced people will bring their knowledge of what hasn't worked in the past so that mistakes are not constantly repeated, and not to reinvent the wheel.

I believe I will quit doing what I do the minute I am so experienced I can't think of anything new to do.

Now, do us all a favour and start hiring not based only on experience but on creativity and perseverance which are far greater virtues.