At what point does years of experience not matter?

I had a discussion with a coworker last week who has been in IT for over 30 years. I've been in for 16 years, he frequently mentions how he's seen all these different things, etc, and how I wouldn't understand, because of his 30 years.

At what point does that not even matter? I'm now far past the first few years, even past the decade mark, is the coworker just pointlessly hung up on something that doesn't mean a lot at this point? I know more time = more experience to draw from, but at a certain point I don't think we'll need to draw parallels to punch cards and 1 meg hard drives.

Thanks.

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Comments

kohr-ah

Being that the world is always developing and technology is always coming up with new and better ways I'd say it always matters. The basics never change but the way it is handled always will.

LeBroke

I think at a certain point, you see the lifecycle of a new piece of tech/paradigm in technology from its inception ("hot new thing") to its maturity, to its decline and eventual replacement by something better. If you're old enough to see the inception of most common technologies (in our case it's probably very late 1990's/early 2000's), more experience probably doesn't matter, as it would be in mostly obsolete software and hardware.

One exception is networking, but even then, modern networking has only been around since 1990's, and at its core, doesn't change as much as, say, web framework.

networker050184

Years of experience are very subjective. The whole ten years versus one year ten times deal. So no real way to answer the question.

sthomas

It's impossible to give an exact number of when the amount of experience no longer matters but I will say this. I have worked in IT for 12+ years and I have known individuals that have worked in IT for 20 years or longer with the same attitude as your coworker. These said individuals think they know a lot about everything IT related but their experience is a mile wide and an inch deep so to speak. A lot of their experience is usually in IT Support and they haven't moved on to bigger or better things. These people usually even struggle with support when it comes to the newer operating systems (Windows 8.1/10, Server 2012 etc...).

markulous

Years of experience don't mean squat IMO. Too many times I've seen people with 10-20+ years of experience that have spent their whole life at a help desk and seem to barely know anything and have to be reminded how to do basic tasks.

Years of good experience and learning absolutely do matter though. I'm not sure at what point that begins to fade, that seems to difficult to really answer.

LeBroke

markulous wrote: »

Years of experience don't mean squat IMO. Too many times I've seen people with 10-20+ years of experience that have spent their whole life at a help desk and seem to barely know anything and have to be reminded how to do basic tasks.

Years of good experience and learning absolutely do matter though. I'm not sure at what point that begins to fade, that seems to difficult to really answer.

I think at this point, it's a question of quantity vs. intensity of experience. All things being equal, experience does tend to matter, IMO. If only because you've seen more stuff get set on fire, and you've been there to fix it, and learn enough to fix it quicker, or prevent it at all for the next time.

It applies to big things (don't put water mains near the server room), or little things (PKIX Java exception probably means you need a root cert and not a domain cert in your keystore).

E Double U

markulous wrote: »

Too many times I've seen people with 10-20+ years of experience that have spent their whole life at a help desk and seem to barely know anything and have to be reminded how to do basic tasks.

Ah, this takes me back to my NOC days working with the lifers.