And like science you can base it on the collective experience versus your personal experience. Preferably from rigorous studies but we mostly lack those in CS. So hopefully you're reading books, blog posts, studies, conference presentations, discussing with colleagues, etc.
>this is why in most serious technical interviews today, you will often get asked about your past experiences.
Interestingly the top companies seem to be focusing a lot less on experience and a lot more on problem solving/system design/etc.
> Interestingly the top companies seem to be focusing a lot less on experience and a lot more on problem solving/system design/etc.
As long as we're making conjectures: this is likely because a lot of them have tools and processes that are very different from what you see "in the wild". e.g. working at Google means you can leverage all their deployment infrastructure, something you likely didn't have access to outside (this is somewhat changing with k8s and cloud services).
>oh yeah I've seen that before, lets not do that here's why
Which can actually be a pretty bad way of going about it imho if you only use your own direct experiences for that. Just like science, basing your decisions on a limited number of anecdotes is problematic because small biased subsets are not representative of the whole.