I think you're missing the point. From the article:

> We ran circles around competitors who had teams of B and C players with security expertise but little else going for them.

He feels experience is negative (I'm guessing) because the experienced candidates only have experience. It is implied that they have no other team skills - just their knowledge of the area. It doesn't matter if you hire the world's foremost expert; if they don't mesh with your team, everyone is going to have a bad time.

Then experience isn't a negative. It is merely insufficient without other requirements like team compatability.

But all other things being equal are you still suggesting that experience is a negative?

No. I never said experience is a negative, but I can see how it was implied. I understand where he's coming from, because there are people who are stuck in their ways. That's not an experience issue - that's a people issue.

No problem. I reread your first reply and I think we agree. I've met plenty devs who believe their 10 repeated years of the same experience entitles them to shout down younger devs.

Problem is, now that I am older I really don't want to be stereotyped as one of those dinosaurs.

The way I interpreted is that it's probably negative if your experience is XY years in the same $foobar industry. In other words, the kind of developers who haven't learned new anything since 2000.

I've met people with over a decade of experience in programming and had to convince them that hey, maybe we should write unit tests because customers keep complaining about bugs? Had hard time in doing it because hey you just refresh a browser and see.

Well, you get the idea. :)

Every time you add a filter for a particular trait or attribute, you're removing filtering power on all the other things you're looking for. Want someone with above-average experience in $foo? You've just halved your candidate pool, which means in order to make a hire you have to relax one bit of selection in some other category.

The question isn't whether experience helps. It's whether experience helps more than the worst part of the applicant filter that you're using. If it does, you should use more experience-based filtering. If it doesn't, you shouldn't.

I'm not suggesting that you filter for experience to the exclusion of other attributes. Instead stop filtering against experience, as some seem to be suggesting.

That said, a hard pass fail filter is a bad idea. Much better to score and rank.

> What the hell is wrong with this industry that experience in the industry is considered a negative? For every other skill the more you do it the better you get, yet the logic here is that the more one works with tech the worse one gets at it.

I can believe that experience of doing (say) chemistry 200 years ago might be so different from current practice that it would be of negative value. Tech changes a lot faster than that. Certainly in practice I've found working with experienced people worse than working with fresh grads, because fresh grads tend to be empiricists, whereas experienced people tend to have fixed technical views that are often outdated. (Of course this is just my subjective experience).

> The only comparable jobs are high impact sports. An older boxer or football player is assumed to have accumulated injuries that make them a worse value proposition. Are devs the same? Am I slowly accumulating the equivalent of career ending sports injuries the longer I am stuck in a job living like a Dilbert comic?

Older mathematicians are famously less effective. I honestly feel like I'm less good at my job than when I started. Certainly experience with outdated tools/paradigms seems like a net negative - it will mislead you when working with modern tools/paradigms.