[chandler]

Consider smartness as "what you can do with what you know," while experience is "what you know"--then, what follows is that having more experience makes up for not being as clever.

    Able to make good choices = Intellect * Experience

Moreover, employers can _try_ to assess intelligence with whiteboard interviews...but the easier factor to evaluate is experience. It's right there on the resume!

[hardwaresofton]

Yeah, except 10 years at certain companies could teach you less than 6months to 1 year at one company that's actually doing it right.

I hesitate to try and prescribe an answer for the "how employers should find good employees" question, because it's so difficult, but I imagine the ideal hiring process would:

- Allow candidates a choice on how they want to be tested (take home thing, online code test, whiteboard, whatever else)

- Ask better questions at the abstraction level that would show experience. For example, if you want to know whether someone has experience, give them an architectural diagram (or process diagram) of your current project/workflow/whatever, and ask them how they would improve it (and if they've ever been through the steps they suggest themselves/how they would roll it out).

There was an excellent post on HN a while back detailing what a specific company (whose job is doing interviews, I can't for the life of me remember what company it was), learned from doing thousands and thousands of interviews.

Also I'm not super good at math, but in the equation you posted wouldn't the intellect variable be pretty much equal to experience, and you could make up for one with the other? Or maybe you're implying that the scales for each multiplier are different (like intelligence might only go 1 to 10 but experience might go 1-100?)? I agree with what you're getting at, basically that someone who has seen lot but isn't as clever will often make better choices than someone that's very clever, but completely green.

[chandler]

> Yeah, except 10 years at certain companies could teach you less than 6months to 1 year at one company that's actually doing it right.

Is it common for programmers that have been on a job to not realize the ways in which their software sucks? Knowing what to avoid and the consequences of doing things wrong is an important factor of experience; additionally, maintaining a bad system gives insight into mitigating problems.

That said, I do agree that experience isn't just a passive function of time (as in "interest earned"). Instead, it's more like a landscape that needs to be explored (and to your point, some companies will allow a programmer to explore more productive areas).

> ...the equation you posted wouldn't the intellect variable be pretty much equal to experience, and you could make up for one with the other?

I suppose the answer to your question would depend on just how much variance you place on intellect. Is it:

- 0.0 (rock) to 1.0 (cleverest human on earth)

- 0.0 (rock) to 1.0 (cleverest intelligence across time and space)

Either way, I wouldn't take the equation too seriously--it was just a model to show a trend :/

[superplussed]

This is usually delineated by wisdom vs intelligence. Intelligence is raw horsepower, and wisdom is the ability to make good decisions.

In the context of older developers, I don't think you can really assume wisdom has been an outcome of all of those years of experience. Wisdom grows with a certain affinity for introspection and self-correction, and not everyone has those traits.

[Doradus]

Agreed. I remember being in my early 20s, watching my more experienced colleagues, and realizing this. I had had a different (incorrect) mental model: I had thought intellect was as good as experience, so Ability = Intellect + Experience. I was wrong.